Trump pauses Ukraine military aid days after Zelensky meeting
San Francisco: US President Donald Trump has suspended military assistance to Ukraine following his blow-up with Volodymyr Zelensky last week as the administration moves to pressure Ukraine’s president to do a deal with Russia to end the war.
“President Trump has been clear that he is focused on peace. We need our partners to be committed to that goal as well,” a White House official told this masthead.
“We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a solution.”
US President Donald Trump speaks alongside Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (left) and C.C. Wei, the head of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.Credit: AP
The decision came only hours after Trump brushed aside speculation he would cut off assistance to Ukraine, saying it wasn’t something he had discussed, but the situation was changing rapidly and “we’ll see what happens”.
In a statement released by the US State Department, which did not directly mention the aid freeze, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “The goal here is to end a war that is costing the lives of thousands of people, destroying a country. Every day that goes by, the cost of rebuilding Ukraine gets higher and higher and higher.”
As Europe woke to the news, the head of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Oleksandr Merezhko, said the aid freeze “looks like he [Trump] is pushing us towards capitulation, meaning [accepting] Russia’s demands”.
France’s junior minister for Europe, Benjamin Haddad, said the US decision made peace more distant “because it only strengthens the hand of the aggressor on the ground, which is Russia”, while a British government spokesperson said it remained committed to securing a lasting peace in Ukraine and was engaging with key allies to support that effort.
It was not immediately clear how consequential the pause would be, as US military assistance to Ukraine is in various stages of dispersal. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies says $US28.6 billion ($46 billion) is committed but not yet obligated, meaning the Defence Department has said how it will use the money, while another $US34.2 billion is obligated but not paid for.
A further $US4 billion was unused and still available at the end of the Biden administration, at Trump’s discretion.
In an interview with Fox News, Vice President J.D. Vance said continuing to throw money and ammunition at the conflict was not a strategy. “The only guy in town with a strategy is the president of the United States and everybody needs to follow his lead,” Vance said.
“The president knows that if you want real security guarantees – if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again – the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine. That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.”
Earlier, Trump rounded on Zelensky for saying a deal to end the war was “far, far away”, claiming it showed the Ukrainian leader was not serious about peace, and branding it “the worst statement” Zelensky could have made.
“He thinks the war’s going to go on for a long time, and he better not be right about that,” Trump said. “It takes two to tango. You’re going to have to make a deal with Russia, and you’re going to have to make a deal with Ukraine … If somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, I think that person won’t be around very long, that person won’t be listened to for very long.”
Trump, who said during last year’s election campaign that he could end the war in 24 hours, is intent on stitching together a deal quickly that makes some concessions to Russia and does not involve the US acting as a security guarantor for Ukraine.
On Friday, Trump kicked Zelensky out of the White House and cancelled a joint press conference after a heated on-camera confrontation in which Trump and Vance branded the Ukrainian leader “disrespectful”, demanding and insufficiently thankful for US assistance in the war effort.
Ukraine has since turned further towards Europe. Zelensky met European leaders in London at the weekend and shook hands with King Charles. Britain and France could unveil their own plans for a peace deal as soon as this week.
Zelensky said on Tuesday that he wanted the war to end as swiftly as possible, but security guarantees for Ukraine were essential to prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin resuming attacks, as he had done before.
He said new air defence systems had arrived from Lithuania, and new artillery contracts had been secured. “Russia continues to fuel this war. The world sees this, and the world acknowledges it,” he said in a video message.
Trump’s shift of US policy from explicit supporter of Ukraine to disinterested mediator has been praised by the Kremlin, whose spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”
Credit: Matt Golding
Asked about those comments on Tuesday (AEDT), Trump maintained Putin wanted to strike a peace deal, but he pushed back against the perception he was too close to the Russian leader.
He reiterated that he had given Ukraine lethal anti-tank weapons and put sanctions on Russia, and noted Putin’s advances – into Georgia (2008), Ukraine’s Crimea (2014) and his full-scale invasion of Ukraine (2022) – occurred on the watch of other US presidents.
“Under president [George] Bush they got Georgia. Under president [Barack] Obama they got a nice big submarine base, a nice big chunk of land, Crimea. Under President Trump they got nothing. And under president [Joe] Biden they tried to get the whole thing ... the whole big Ukraine,” Trump said.
“Putin is the one that will tell you this has not been so good for them. I gave Russia nothing except grief. I gave them [Ukraine] sanctions and Javelins [missiles] ... and then they say how close I am to Russia.”
The development comes as a CBS News/YouGov poll at the weekend showed Americans were evenly divided on how Trump was handling Russia’s war on Ukraine, with 51 per cent approving and 49 per cent disapproving.
But that marked a considerable turnaround from April 2024, when 39 per cent approved of Biden on the topic, and 61 per cent disapproved. The CBS poll was more negative than others on Biden’s performance but broadly matched others as Americans’ support for US involvement in the war dwindled as it dragged on.
The latest survey found about two-thirds of Americans still saw Russia as unfriendly or an enemy of the US, but they were evenly divided on whether the US should continue to send weapons or military aid to Ukraine.
Those shifting sentiments may explain why the administration was keen to showcase the Oval Office blow-up, with the White House pumping out material that characterised the interaction as a masterstroke, and Trump allies portraying it as the moment he stood up for America against the world.
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