Blackmail and bullying: The Trump administration is happy to resort to such practices in its attempts to make Volodymyr Zelensky do its bidding. Three days after the stormy meeting between US President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, the White House offered Moscow another unexpected gift on Monday, March 3: It decided to freeze all deliveries of arms and munitions to Ukraine, the victim of a Russian invasion in 2022.

In three years, the United States has spent $67 billion (€64 billion) on military aid for Kyiv. Today, the American administration is no longer treating the country as an ally, preferring to humiliate it and make it more vulnerable. In the name of a supposedly equal concern for the dead on both sides, Trump wants to extract a ceasefire by any means necessary. To achieve this, he is turning his back on the victim and the Europeans within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), who have renewed their commitment to Ukraine.

There are still around $3.8 billion of funds already allocated by Congress but not used to draw on the Pentagon's stocks. During the transition period, the Biden administration tried to use the remaining funds as quickly as possible, but some administrative and operational delays could not be shortened. For the past three years, US military aid has essentially been a subsidy to the country's own military-industrial sector, and a way for the army to renew its equipment, even if production has struggled to keep pace on some systems.

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