KYIV/WASHINGTON, Dec 21 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy headed to Washington on Wednesday to meet President Joe Biden, address Congress and seek “weapons, weapons and more weapons” in his first overseas trip since Russia invaded Ukraine 300 days ago.
Zelenskiy said the visit was meant to strengthen Ukraine’s “resilience and defence capabilities” amid repeated Russian missile and drone attacks on the country’s energy and water supplies in the dead of winter.
His political adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said the visit showed the high degree of trust between the two countries and offered him the opportunity to explain what weapons Kyiv needed.
“This finally puts an end to the attempts by the Russian side … to prove an allegedly growing cooling in our bilateral relations,” Podolyak told Reuters.
“This, of course, is not even close. The United States unequivocally supports Ukraine.”
Biden will announce nearly $2 billion in further military assistance for Ukraine that will include a Patriot missile battery to help it defend itself against barrages of Russian missiles, a senior U.S. official said.
“…Weapons, weapons and more weapons. It is important to personally explain why we need certain types of weapons,” Podolyak said. “In particular, armoured vehicles, the latest missile defence systems and long-range missiles.”
Zelenskiy’s visit was expected to last several hours.
He will hold a meeting with Biden at the White House at 2:30 p.m. (1930 GMT), participate in a joint news conference with the U.S. president and then go to Capitol Hill to address a joint session of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
White House spokesman John Kirby said diplomacy and defence capabilities would top the agenda.
“Clearly we’re going to make sure that President Zelenskiy, when he leaves this country, knows that he’s leaving with the full support of the United States going forward,” he told MSNBC in an interview ahead of Zelenskiy’s arrival.
FIX PROBLEMS, PUTIN TELLS ARMY
Russian President Vladimir Putin was defiant on Wednesday at an end-of-year meeting of top defence chiefs, saying Russian forces were fighting like heroes in Ukraine, would be equipped with modern weapons and would achieve all Moscow’s goals.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 aiming to capture the capital Kyiv in days, a goal that quickly proved out of reach.
Moscow then focused on advancing along eastern and southern fronts but has suffered a string of battlefield defeats since the summer – amid widespread reports of disorganisation, poor training and shoddy gear – and on Tuesday Putin conceded that conditions in Russian-held areas were “highly complicated”.
In his remarks on Wednesday, Putin said there were no financial limits on what the government would provide in terms of equipment and hardware, but the army had to learn from and fix the problems it had experienced in Ukraine.
He gave his backing to a plan by his defence minister to boost the size of the armed forces by more than 30% to 1.5 million combat personnel. A call-up of 300,000 reservists in September was plagued with problems, with many men physically unfit or too old and lacking basic equipment.
Putin also said he still considered Ukrainians – who have been killed in their tens of thousands, forced to flee in their millions, and seen whole towns and cities destroyed – to be a “brotherly” people.
He blamed the war on “third countries (seeking) the disintegration of the…
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