US plans $425 million Ukraine weapons aid announcement
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Transcript
00:00 The bottom line in Ukraine is that the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin is right when he says, as he did recently, that without US support, Ukraine loses.
00:09 Perhaps not in the sense of being completely taken over by Russia, but certainly in the sense of having to give up on winning back the territories currently occupied by Russia.
00:18 The United States is by far the biggest supplier of weapons to Ukraine, and although the European countries, particularly Germany, have been increasing their supplies,
00:27 they don't really have the capacity, even if they had the political will, to provide the amounts of ammunition and other weapons that Ukraine needs.
00:36 So US support is absolutely critical, and the country is watching very, very closely events in Washington.
00:42 Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President's visit to Washington in September, was regarded as not the success that Ukrainians were hoping for.
00:51 He met a much more lukewarm reception, gone the standing ovations that he received the first time he visited in December 2022.
00:59 Now, there's a lot of talk in Ukraine about what the presidential office should be doing differently, what the communication strategy should be.
01:06 That's probably why Valery Zelensky, the chief of general staff, published his article in The Economist,
01:13 accompanied by an interview in which he talks very, very frankly about the danger of a stalemate and about what Ukraine needs in order to regain the technological edge.
01:24 And certainly it's clear from what he says Ukraine needs that it's going to need more Western and particularly US support in order to achieve those things that he says he wants.
01:34 So there's certainly a lot of worry, but there is also, for the moment anyway, a degree of confidence that the aid package currently on the table in the United States will be voted through.
01:46 There is still support in the Republican Party, a majority of Republican members of Congress do support aid for Ukraine,
01:55 even if there are trends in public opinion that suggest that the general public in the US is less in favor, getting less and less in favor,
02:03 and the politicians there are of course following public opinion to a degree.
02:08 And that's why Kiev regards its own communication strategy as absolutely crucial and is working on improving it.