Blinken in Kyiv to funnel aid as Russia steps up offensive

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken began a two-day visit to Ukraine on Tuesday to buttress the morale of the government in Kyiv.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives by train at Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi station in Kyiv. Picture: AFP

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken began a two-day visit to Ukraine on Tuesday to buttress the morale of the government in Kyiv and help channel the delivery of $US60bn ($90.9bn) in newly approved US aid to help ­resist a grinding Russian offensive.

The question now, though, is whether the aid, which languished for months before US congress ­approved it last month, is enough to daunt a resurgent Russian military that the US and Mr Blinken himself had derided as all but washed up last year.

Mr Blinken’s arrival in Kyiv is meant “to send a strong signal of reassurance to the Ukrainians”, said a senior US official.

With Russian forces simultaneously pushing toward the major city of Kharkiv near the Russian border, as well attacking Ukrainian defences in the eastern provinces of Ukraine, “We’re ­obviously in a very difficult ­moment,” he said.

Distracted by the outbreak of fighting in Gaza, Mr Blinken hasn’t visited Ukraine since September, although he had promised to visit regularly. He has visited the Middle East seven times since Hamas launched its attack on ­Israel on October 7.

While in Kyiv on Tuesday, Mr Blinken is expected to meet with Ukraine’s Prime Minister and later with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

A key objective of Mr Blinken’s visit will be to discuss “how our supplemental assistance is going to be executed in a fashion to help shore up their defences and enable them to take back the initiative on the battlefield”, the official said.

That initiative could be drawing out of reach. After Russian forces breached defences near Kharkiv last week, seizing several villages and opening a new front in the third year of the war, Ukraine was forced to funnel reinforcements to the region over the weekend.

That could jeopardise other parts of Ukraine’s front, especially the already-strained forces in the east of the Donbas. Having seized the advantage on the battlefield, Moscow appears to be redoubling efforts before the arrival of US aid, which will presumably help Ukraine stiffen its resistance, military analysts say.

The senior US official said that some of the new aid from the US was already arriving on the front lines.

“We can clearly see how the enemy acts and their intent to stretch our forces thin,” Mr Zelensky said on the eve of Mr Blinken’s visit. “Our task is crystal clear: to thwart Russia’s attempt to expand the war.”

Ukraine will probably be able to prevent a breakthrough around Kharkiv but faces a serious challenge along many parts of the front, said David Lewis, professor of global politics, from the University of Exeter. “It needs to balance the defence of territory around Kharkiv with the need to contain Russian advances further south in the Donbas.”

To help stem the offensives, the US has been rushing in conventional artillery rounds, interceptors, and the ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) which can hit any Russian target inside Ukraine, a senior US official said.

Ukraine has long pleaded for long-range precision artillery to break up Russian military logistics and attack forces before they can reach the front lines.

But US officials say that a paucity of weaponry on the front line is only part of the problem, as Ukraine is also facing a Russian military that appears to have learned from its mistakes early in the war and is now showing signs of innovation and resurgence.

After Ukrainian successes against Russian invaders last year, Mr Blinken gave a speech in Finland calling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a “strategic failure” and saying that Russia’s army was badly degraded.

“The Kremlin often claimed it had the second-strongest military in the world, and many believed it,” he said then. “Today, many see Russia’s military as the second-strongest in Ukraine. Its equipment, technology, leadership, troops, strategy, tactics, and morale, a case study in failure.”

Earlier this year, US officials began saying that Russia has – with the help of China, Iran and North Korea – rebuilt its military much faster than expected, and that it is now larger than it was ­before the onset of its invasion in 2022 and better adapted to fighting in Ukraine.

Despite unprecedented sanctions from the US and its allies, Moscow has expanded military production, and has been able to arrange workarounds for hi-tech components for its weaponry, US officials say.

While in Ukraine, Mr Blinken is expected to deliver a corollary to the speech he gave in Finland and talk about Ukraine’s own effort to revamp its defence industry, which before the war made it the fourth-largest arms exporter in the world.

The Wall Street Journal