WASHINGTON, United States
President Donald Trump is ordering a pause on shipments of US military aid to Ukraine after his heated Oval Office argument with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week, a White House official said Monday.
The halt in aid, which came after Trump held a series of meetings with top national security officials at the White House, could have dire effect on Ukraine’s war-fighting abilities, officials and analysts said.
It will remain in place until Trump determines Zelensky has made
a commitment to seeking peace talks, one official said, essentially forcing
Ukraine to a negotiating table by threatening further losses on the
battlefield.
“The president has been clear
that he is focused on peace. We need our partners to be committed to that goal
as well. We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing
to a solution,” the White House official said.
After more than a week of open
hostility between Washington and Kyiv, Monday’s pause was the most material
sign of how far the relationship has deteriorated since Trump took office.
In recent weeks, Trump has
echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s talking points, falsely claiming
Ukraine started the war and accusing Zelensky of being a dictator, but his
decision to halt the delivery of military aid is a move that could have real consequences
for the balance of the conflict and strengthen Putin’s hand.
The pause will apply to all
military equipment not yet inside Ukraine, officials said, and amounts to a
direct response to what Trump views as Zelensky’s bad behavior last week.
Ukraine could likely sustain
its current fighting pace for several weeks — perhaps until the start of the
summer — before a US pause would begin to have a major effect, Western
officials said in the wake of the decision. The Biden administration rushed shipments
of weapons to Ukraine in its waning days, providing the country with large
stockpiles of advanced weapons.
It is those sophisticated
weapons — including the long-range ATACMS missiles — that have allowed Ukraine
to strike deep into Russian territory, a strategy that could suffer if those
weapons remain paused.
While European nations may be
able to replace US shipments of artillery, supplemented by Ukraine’s own
growing defense industry, the most advanced weapons used by Kyiv come from the
United States.
“The impact is going to be
big. I would call it crippling,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the
Center for Strategic and International Studies who has closely followed the
war.
Cancian estimated that Ukraine
would feel the impacts of the pause in aid within two to four months, as aid
from European countries helps Kyiv remain in the fight for now. “That’s why
they don’t fall off a cliff, but when your supplies get cut in half, eventually
that shows up on the front lines,” Cancian said. “Their front lines would
continue to buckle and eventually they would break and Ukraine would have to
accept an adverse – even catastrophic – peace settlement.”
But Cancian warned the Trump
administration has more forms of aid to Ukraine that can be paused or canceled
altogether, including intelligence sharing and the training of Ukrainian
forces. “There might be a way out of this, but it’s going to be extremely
humiliating for Zelensky,” Cancian said.
The White House made the
decision to pause military aid to Ukraine for now as officials seek an
acknowledgement from Zelensky about the
breakdown in relations following Friday’s blowup in the Oval Office.
According to several officials, Trump and his senior aides are seeking an acknowledgement from Zelensky – potentially in the form of a public apology – before moving ahead with a deal on Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, which had been close to agreement before Friday’s meeting, or a discussion on continuing foreign aid.
The decision to
halt the aid was made later on Monday, one person said, and is part of a
pressure strategy on Ukraine.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
publicly called for Zelensky to apologize for Friday in
an interview on CNN.
The halt puts Trump even more
clearly at odds with the United States’ traditional European
allies like Britain and France, who made clear their support for
Zelensky at a summit in London on Sunday.
“There is a capability gap
that Europe cannot fill alone,” one US official said.
A European official called the
Trump administration’s decision to pause military aid to Ukraine “petty and
wrong.”
The official said it will
immediately deepen distrust in the US government among the Ukrainian people.
The official also predicted it will cause unnecessary civilian casualties, as
Ukraine will not be able to defend against Russian air attacks after they run
out of air defense missiles.
“I’m beyond disappointed,” the
official said
Since the start of the war, the Biden administration announced 74 separate packages of military aid pulled directly from US inventories, allowing the critical munitions and supplies to flow quickly to Ukraine.
The largest of these packages was nearly $3 billion,
though most were far smaller. Zelensky has repeatedly thanked the US for the
weapons on social media, as well as in calls and meetings with American
officials.
The pause comes one day after a defense official told our reporter that military aid to Ukraine announced by the Biden administration was still flowing. Those shipments included critical munitions such as anti-tank weapons, thousands of artillery rounds, and rockets.
Those
shipments were expected to continue for several weeks, but the decision from
the Trump administration freezes the aid that was en route.
“DoD is also providing other
capabilities, such as armored vehicles, as soon as required repairs are
completed,” the defense official said on Sunday. The US had set up facilities
in Poland to repair Western equipment damaged on the battlefield before sending
it back to the Ukrainian military.
There are also multiple
longer-term contracts between arms manufacturers and the US to send weapons
systems and air defense systems to Ukraine.
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