The US and Ukraine signed off Thursday on a 10-year security agreement, with the leaders of the Group of Seven nations pledging to arrange a $50 billion loan to the war-torn nation.
The security deal, signed by President Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ahead of a joint news conference on the sidelines of the annual G7 summit in southern Italy, will boost weapons-production cooperation, provide other military assistance and increase intelligence sharing.
The agreement also commits the Pentagon to another decade of training Ukraine’s armed forces.
“A lasting peace for Ukraine must be underwritten by Ukraine’s own ability to defend itself now and to deter future aggression anytime in the future,” Biden said. “The United States is going to help ensure that Ukraine can do both – not by sending American troops to fight Ukraine, but by providing weapons and ammunition; expanding intelligence sharing; continuing to train brave Ukrainian troops at bases in Europe and the United States; enhancing interoperability between our militaries in line with NATO standards; and investing in Ukraine’s defense industrial base.”
The US also announced a fresh military aid package for Kyiv valued at $225 million, which includes “air-defense interceptors; artillery systems and munitions; armored vehicles; and anti-tank weapons,” according to the White House.
Funding for the package will come out of the $60 billion Congress allocated to Ukraine defense spending as part of a supplemental funding bill approved in April.
The US is also expected to announce that it is sending Kyiv a second Patriot missile system, which Zelensky has said is critical to his country’s defense against Russian air and missile strikes on civilian infrastructure.
“All our other partners, they know that urgently we need seven Patriot systems to save our cities – not all of them, we’d still need more – but urgently seven,” the Ukrainian leader said Thursday. “And we discussed the possibility of having five of them … and the partners work on it.”
“It doesn’t mean that tomorrow we will have these five systems, but we see in the closest future, good result for Ukraine,” he added
Though the official announcement of the Patriot donation did not come Thursday, Biden and Zelensky said that the US has worked to secure commitments from unnamed countries to provide five additional Patriot missile systems to Ukraine in the near future.
Biden met with Zelensky just two days before the start of the 90-nation Ukraine Peace Summit in Lucerne, Switzerland. The US president is skipping out on the event – which aims to develop a path to the end of the war with Russia – to attend a Hollywood fundraiser hosted by George Clooney on Saturday.
Biden is sending Vice President Kamala Harris and national security adviser Jake Sullivan to represent the United States in his place.
Meanwhile, the G7 — which includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the US and the European Union — announced the broad outlines of the $50 billion loan, which would be mostly guaranteed by Washington and backed by profits earned on roughly $260 billion in immobilized Russian assets — the vast majority of which are held by European nations.
The loan, which a French official told the Associated Press could be “topped up” with European money or contributions from other countries, is due to be officially announced Friday.
The US and its allies immediately froze whatever Russian central bank assets they had access to when Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022. However, the assets still belong to Russia and rendering them forfeit for Ukraine’s benefit would require a legal basis and time-consuming court proceedings.
In April, Congress passed and Biden signed into law the so-called REPO Act — short for Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians Act — that allows the White House to seize $5 billion in Russian state assets in the US and use them for the benefit of Kyiv.
With Post wires