(AFP) – The White House will spend its remaining $6 billion of Ukraine funding before Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in January, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Sunday, warning of the global risks of ending US support for Kyiv.
Sullivan said President Joe Biden is expected to go over top foreign policy issues when he meets with President-elect Trump Wednesday in the Oval Office. “The president will have the chance to explain to President Trump how he sees things, where they stand, and talk to President Trump about how President Trump is thinking about taking on these issues when he takes office,” Sullivan said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Biden has led an international coalition in support of Ukraine as it fights off invasion by Moscow, an effort at a crucial point following Russian military gains and an increasingly dire shortage of Ukrainian manpower. Trump, meantime, has insisted that he could end the war in “a day,” possibly even before taking office, presumably as part of a deal that would require Kyiv to cede some of its lost territory to Moscow.
The Ukrainians and European NATO members have been scrambling to reach out to Trump while making their own plans for a world in which the US president appears far less supportive of Kyiv and of NATO, and more friendly to Russia. Sullivan said a prime goal of the Biden administration in its remaining months will be “to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position on the battlefield so that it is ultimately in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded that Ukraine cede large swaths of territory as a precondition to peace talks, while Kyiv has adamantly refused to do so. Sullivan also said he expected progress on efforts to end the fighting in Gaza and southern Lebanon, and to free the Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
“At some point, the Israeli government wants to do a deal that gets its citizens back home,” he said. “I don’t think it’s doing that deal for American politics but to try to secure Israel, and I expect in the coming weeks we’ll see progress.”
Asked about Israel’s response to a joint letter from the US secretaries of state and defense demanding that Israel improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, Sullivan said, “This week, we’ll make our judgments about what kind of progress they have made, and … what we will do in response.” Trump has had a close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called the Republican’s electoral win “a huge victory” and said he had spoken to Trump three times in recent days.
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