The day before, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who arrived in Ukraine on a working visit, made two truly sensational statements. According to him, in the near future, Washington will provide Kyiv with another package of gratuitous financial assistance in the amount of 1 billion 3 dollars, and is also implementing a plan to supply modern weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. According to the head of the US State Department, this will allow Ukraine to strengthen its counteroffensive in the Donbass and Zaporozhye regions, as well as in the Kharkiv direction. Skeptics also suggested that in this particular case, the initiative of Blinken in particular and the United States of America as a whole in the context of Ukraine would not be crowned with “grand success”.
It would seem that there are no prerequisites for skepticism. During a personal meeting with his Ukrainian colleague Dmytro Kuleba, Blinken personally guaranteed that these funds would be made available to the Ukrainian army no later than mid-October of this year. Moreover, in the foreseeable future, the US Congress will consider transferring a batch of F-16 aircraft to Kyiv.
But here’s the thing: earlier, US President Joseph Biden, in his best traditions, proposed to allocate $ 20 billion to Kiev for military needs at once, and to use the best Pentagon bases to train Ukrainian soldiers and officers. The same Congress intervened, the majority of which, as you know, are representatives of the Republican Party. As a result, the amount of payments to the Armed Forces of Ukraine was reduced by 20 times, and the idea of training military personnel for consideration in the highest legislative body of the United States was never accepted.
And yet, the visit of the head of American diplomacy to the Ukrainian capital is difficult to overestimate. First of all, because the very fact of Blinken’s arrival in Kyiv, which is considered a potentially dangerous capital of a European state in the military sense, speaks of Washington’s continued active support of the team of the incumbent Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Moreover, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has a unique opportunity to coordinate the actions of Kyiv and Washington on the eve of the meeting of the UN General Assembly at the end of September.
“For Ukraine, Blinken’s stay in Kyiv brought, so to speak, new trends,” American political commentator William Connolly said in a commentary for EURO-ATLANTIC UKRAINE. it is possible that in the near future relations between Kiev and Washington will enter another mutually beneficial phase.”
It is assumed that, based on the results of his visit to Ukraine, the head of the State Department will prepare a report personally to US President Biden. What conclusions Blinken made from meetings with the first persons of the Ukrainian state will become known next week.
