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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he is confident he still has broad US backing despite “strange” voices in Congress and the exclusion of more aid for Kyiv from a US spending deal.
US lawmakers jettisoned $6bn in Ukraine aid to avert a government shutdown at the weekend, a decision Zelenskyy linked to next year’s US elections. “Of course [it’s a] difficult election period for the United States. Different voices. Some of the voices are very strange,” Ukraine’s president said on Thursday at a summit of European leaders in Granada, Spain.
Zelenskyy, however, insisted he had US president Joe Biden’s “100 per cent support” and “bipartisan support in Congress”. Rather than worrying about the developments in Congress, Zelenskyy said, “I think we have to work on it.”
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said she was “very confident” that Washington’s support for Ukraine would continue and praised a decision by Biden to reassure western allies during a call on Monday.
“What the United States is working on is the timing,” von der Leyen told reporters.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s chief diplomat, said the US funding cut for Ukraine “was certainly not expected and certainly not good news . . . The hope is that it is not going to be the definite position of the US.”
“My hope, the hope of the Ukrainians, and I think everyone who doesn’t want [Vladimir] Putin to win this war, is to look for ways for the US to rethink this issue and continue supporting Ukraine,” Borrell added. “Certainly, Europe cannot replace the US . . . US support is something irreplaceable for Ukraine.”
Spain’s acting prime minister Pedro Sánchez, who hosted the European Political Community summit, an informal gathering of almost 50 leaders, said Madrid was firmly behind expanding the EU to include Ukraine and several other candidate countries that would take the bloc from 27 to 35 members.
He said Spain wanted accession talks for Ukraine to formally begin, but noted that the EU needed to see first that “the steps that are logically laid down in the treaties have been fulfilled and that reforms have been carried out by the Ukrainian side”.
The commission is assessing Ukraine’s progress in seven areas, including anti-corruption reform and minority rights, ahead of a decision by EU governments on whether to open accession talks with Kyiv by the end of the year.
Noting that Spain itself had been a beneficiary of EU expansion in 1986, Sánchez said a new wave of members would raise “many challenges internally over how to remain effective”.
EU leaders gathering in Granada on Thursday and Friday are also set to debate measures to stem illegal migration and the bloc’s effort to boost its “strategic autonomy” by reducing its economic dependence on China.
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