President Joe Biden will urge Donald Trump to keep supporting Ukraine amid concerns the president-elect could cut military-aid to the war-stricken nation.
Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, said Biden will make a final plea to keep the US ‘in’ the Russia-Ukraine war during a meeting at the Oval Office on Wednesday.
Trump has famously pledged to end the war within a day of becoming president and has boasted of his ‘very good relationship’ with President Putin, apparently warning him not to escalate the conflict when they spoke over the phone on Thursday.
He has also said the invasion would never have happened if he had been in the White House and has criticised Biden’s level of support for Ukraine.
Now in a meeting to discuss a smooth transition of power, Biden will argue that ‘the United States should not walk away from Ukraine; that walking away from Ukraine means more instability in Europe’, CBS has reported.
Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky meet at Trump Tower in New York in September
President Joe Biden speaks at the National Veterans Day Observance at the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery
President Donald Trump meets with Russia’s Vladimir Putin at the G-20 Summit in Hamburg in July 2017
Since the war started in 2022, the US has been the biggest provider of financial and military assistance to Ukraine.
Biden is also expected to spend the remaining $6 billion in Ukraine security assistance funds before he steps down as President in January.
Britain, France and Germany have already vowed to support Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’ and Zelensky is adamantly against relinquishing territory to Putin.
Last week it emerged that Trump could propose a 800-mile demilitarised zone between Russia and Ukraine as part of a plan to end the war early.
The plans, which were outlined by three Trump staffers, would involve the zone being policed by British and European troops.
It would mean that Russia would keep its territorial gains made in Ukraine with the current border frozen in place. Kyiv would also have to assure that it would not join NATO for 20 years.
Under the plans the US would arm Ukraine in return for preventing Russia from restarting the war. However, responsibility for manning and financing the buffer zone would fall solely on Ukraine’s European allies.
Zelensky (pictured) is adamantly against relinquishing territory to Vladimir Putin
There are fears US military aid for Ukraine will dwindle when Trump becomes president (US army file photo)
Ukrainian servicemen of the 26th artillery brigade fire an AHS Krab self-propelled howitzer toward Russian positions near the front line in the Chasiv Yar area
‘We can do training and other support but the barrel of the gun is going to be European,’ a member of Trump’s team told the Wall Street Journal.
‘We are not sending American men and women to uphold peace in Ukraine. And we are not paying for it. Get the Poles, Germans, British and French to do it.’
Top Russian security official Sergei Shoigu said on Thursday that the situation in the combat zone in Ukraine is not in Kyiv’s favour and that the West should accept this and negotiate an end to the conflict, the Interfax news agency reported.
‘Now, when the situation in the theatre of military operations is not in the favour of the Kyiv regime, the West is faced with a choice – to continue financing it and destroying the Ukrainian population or to recognise the current realities and start negotiating,’ Shoigu was cited as telling a meeting of secretaries of Commonwealth of Independent States nations’ security councils in Moscow.
Many analysts have warned that Trump is indeed likely to reduce US military aid to Ukraine and force Kyiv’s European partners to shoulder a huge burden to maintain an adequate supply of arms – a move that would certainly pile pressure on Zelensky to consider a negotiated settlement.
An aerial view shows the destroyed city of Vovchansk in the Kharkiv Region, near the border with Russia, on October 2
Donald Trump pulled off an astounding political comeback and regained the White House in a dominant victory in the 2024 US presidential election
Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky accuses the West of ignoring the threat of 11,000 North Korean troops starting to engage his forces in the war zone
‘Trump does have a legitimate point about European allies having underperformed in defence and over-relied on Uncle Sam to protect them for too long, and this is a huge wake-up call to the West,’ Dr Russell Foster, Senior Lecturer in British and International Politics at King’s College London, told MailOnline.
‘But Europe, Canada, and Australasia have let their defence spending stagnate for so long, they have nowhere near the industrial base and military infrastructure to help defend Ukraine and themselves from further aggression without American help.
‘We are likely to see major calls for defence spending and investment across NATO – but this will take years to build up and be hugely expensive at a time of economic stagnation. The future of Western defence is now looking very bleak.’
Ed Arnold, Senior Research Fellow for European Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank, added: ‘The immediate crisis within Europe will be how to continue diplomatic, military and humanitarian support to Ukraine without the US.
‘Whichever mechanism it comes through – NATO, the EU, or bilaterally – it will be incredibly expensive.’
