Director of the North America studies programme at the Ukrainian Prism Foreign Policy Council, Oleksandr Kraiev has opined that while the removal of Kevin McCarthy as U.S House Speaker is certainly a “negative development”, it is unlikely to affect cooperation between the two allies.
“From a procedural point of view, it can really delay both the adoption of the annual federal budget and the allocation of new security aid packages for Ukraine – due to new Speaker elections,” Kraiev noted.
Nonetheless, the Ukrainian analyst believes that the current situation in the U.S House of Representatives will not be a danger to Ukrainian-American cooperation on a strategic level.
“Apart from the delay in the adoption of the budget, it does not pose any real threats to the strategic level of US-Ukrainian cooperation … which is ensured by the continuous cooperation between the executive branches of government.”
Oleksandr Kraiev
“The Ukrainian authorities are convinced that American democracy is able to survive such crises and stabilise itself,” he added.
Earlier, Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy pledged that Ukraine will do everything to win its war with Russia.
Speaking to an Italian broadcaster via a translator, Zelenskyy admitted that “There is fatigue.”
“But we will do everything to win against our enemy, and our counter-offensive goes ahead, even if slowly we do everything to repel the enemy,” he added.
Zelenskyy said that Ukraine felt support from the United States in “these very difficult times” and was convinced this would be the case in the future despite the delay in the approval of U.S financial aid.
U.S To Transfer Iranian Weapons To Ukraine
According to two foreign news agencies, the U.S is planning to fill the shortage in Ukraine’s weapons stocks by transferring thousands of seized Iranian weapons and ammunition to its military.
Both news organisations reported that American officials told them the US military is to announce the policy this week.
It remains unclear how the US would legally transfer the weapons to Kyiv because United Nations regulations require seized weapons to be destroyed or stored.
The US and other countries, including the UK, regularly seize what they say are Iranian weapons carried by smugglers in the waters around the Arabian Peninsula, usually believed to be on their way to Houthi rebels in Yemen.
However, most of the weapons to be transferred to Ukraine will be small, rather than the heavy weaponry Ukraine needs to fight Russia.
That’s a worry for Kyiv, particularly when the U.S Congress is showing few signs that it will be able to move forward with more spending for Ukraine in the short term.
Meanwhile, the head of NATO’s Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, stated that the arms industry needs to increase ammunition and weapons production as they have been depleted due to the war in Ukraine.
Speaking on the first day of the Warsaw Security Forum, Bauer noted that while budgets had increased years before the conflict, the industry had not increased production capacity.
“That has led to higher prices already before the war,” Bauer said.
“And that actually has [been] exacerbated by the fact that we now give away weapon systems to Ukraine, which is great, and ammunition, but not from full warehouses,” he added.
“We started to give away from half-full or lower warehouses in Europe and therefore the bottom of the barrel is now visible. And we need the industry to ramp up production in a much higher tempo and we need large volumes.”
Admiral Rob Bauer
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