The Ukrainian president urged his European and American allies in Oslo on Wednesday to continue their aid.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged his European and American allies in Oslo on Wednesday to continue their aid, at a time when new envelopes are blocked by dissensions both in Brussels and in Washington.
Russian President Vladimir “Putin has found cronies in Iran and North Korea, receiving weapons that are killing our people,” Zelensky said in a speech to the Norwegian Parliament.
“Unfortunately, dictators supply Russia more regularly than many democracies do for Ukraine,” he lamented on the eve of an important EU summit in Brussels.
In the United States and the European Union, the payment of tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine is currently hampered by internal divisions.
The military counter-offensive launched in June by the Ukrainian army having not brought the hoped-for results, Mr. Zelensky is seeking to remobilize his allies.
“Of course you can’t win without help,” he said shortly after arriving in Oslo early Wednesday.
In the Norwegian capital, he notably participated in a meeting of the leaders of the five Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland) on which he is counting to finance his project to produce NATO-type weapons on Ukrainian territory.
“What Europe can do is do the same thing (…) as what the Nordic countries are doing,” he stressed.
Since the start of the war in February 2022, the Nordic countries say they have devoted a total of around 11 billion euros to supporting Ukraine.
“Now is not the time to weaken,” said their five leaders in an open letter published in the Financial Times.
Norway, for example, agreed at the start of the year multi-year aid to Ukraine, civil and military, of 6.8 billion euros over the period 2023-2027.
On Wednesday, it announced the payment of just over 250 million euros as part of this package, including crucial new anti-aircraft weapons as the country continues to be bombed by Russia.
More than fifty people were injured Wednesday in a nighttime missile attack on kyiv.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, for her part, indicated that her government would present on Thursday a “new package” of military aid to Ukraine worth close to one billion euros.
Crucial summit
The opening of EU accession negotiations and the approval of European aid of 50 billion euros for Ukraine, in the form of donations and loans, will be on the menu of a European summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday.
Hungarian nationalist Viktor Orban, the only EU leader to have maintained close ties with the Kremlin after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has threatened to block these key decisions for Ukraine, which he accuses in particular of corruption.
“I am ready to conclude financial agreements on financial issues,” he said in an interview published on Wednesday, but without specific reference to aid to Ukraine.
“I asked him to give me a reason, not three, five or ten, but one reason. I am still waiting for the answer,” commented Mr. Zelensky. “He has no reason to block Ukrainian membership in the EU.”
Refusing negotiations in this sense would mean that Russian President Vladimir “Putin has vetoed it,” he said.
Before Oslo, the Ukrainian president was in Washington where he failed to convince Congress, divided on the issue, to approve a new envelope of 61 billion dollars for his country, simply saying he had received “positive” signals.
Congress has committed more than $110 billion to provide military equipment to Ukraine and support it economically, but has so far failed to agree on the extension requested by the White House, to keep the less until the presidential election in November 2024 in the United States.
Democrats are in favor of this extension.
Apart from a handful of elected officials from the radical right, the Republicans are not totally opposed to it. But they link their support to a major tightening of US immigration policy.
For its part, the Kremlin estimated on Tuesday that any new American aid was doomed to a “fiasco”, while the Russian army claimed “significant” progress on part of the front.