It is an agreement to protect democracy around the world,” says Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “It shows Russia that we are not willing to take any step back,” claims Joe Biden. The question is whether the agreement signed yesterday by the American president and his Ukrainian counterpart – defined as “historic” by Zelensky, “the strongest with the United States since our independence” – will last the promised 10 years or the handful of months that missing from the American elections.
The bilateral security agreement with Kiev, which Biden had compared to the one in force with Israel, is not in fact a treaty that must be approved by Congress, and therefore risks being swept away with extreme simplicity, in a few hours, if Donald Trump should he regain the White House. But in the meantime it is “unprecedented” and was at the center of the joint press conference held yesterday evening by Biden and Zelensky, a highly publicized bilateral precisely to represent as ironclad an alliance that risks being very fragile on the contrary.
As the journalists themselves point out to the leader of Kiev – what does he intend to do if the governments that signed these commitments soon change? Zelensky can only be evasive, he condemns the “cruelty” of the Russian war and adds: “If the people are with us, every leader will be with us in this fight for justice.”
BUT WHAT DOES IT CONSIST OF this agreement with the USA? Biden explains it: supply of weapons and ammunition, “support for industrial development” so that Kiev is in a position to “independently produce” armaments, expansion “of mutual intelligence sharing”, support for economic and energy recovery after “Russia struck Ukraine’s infrastructure repeatedly.”
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Furthermore, the commitment to train Ukrainian military personnel continues – but in European countries, allowing the Americans not to put their boots on the ground in Ukraine – and the US approval for the “acceleration of Kiev’s entry into the Atlantic Alliance” , monitoring the necessary democratic reforms in the country. To those who ask him whether he also intends to review his position on the use of American long-range weapons in war, allowing strikes at the heart of Russia, Biden responds in the negative: «It makes perfect sense to strike the Russian positions from which it comes Ukraine attacked”, but “just across the border. Our position in this sense has not changed.”
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT among the three “goals” achieved by the G7, it then includes the 50 billion in profits from frozen Russian sovereign funds that will be allocated to the defense and reconstruction of Ukraine announced on the eve of the summit by French President Emmanuel Macron and confirmed yesterday on his profile «The G7 approved the provision of loans worth $50 billion to Ukraine by the end of the year. We will use the profits generated by frozen Russian sovereign wealth funds to cover them.” A European action, you add on X von der Leyen, to contribute “to the defense and reconstruction of Ukraine”.
THE RUSSIAN REACTION – after the media had underlined the weakness of the majority of the governments participating in the summit during the day – was angry: the spokesperson of the Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova declared that if the West uses Russian funds «Moscow’s response will be very painful for the European Union.”
In the meantime, however, towards Russia, during the joint conference with Zelensky Biden announces 300 new sanctions “on individuals and entities” that do business with Moscow, as well as warning all banks and financial institutions that do the same: “You too can be sanctioned ». There is constant reference to China and its supply of technologies necessary to build Moscow’s weapons. Zelensky, less involved in the clash between great powers, glosses over the question about Beijing with a Shakespearean turn of phrase about Xi – an honorable man who «guaranteed me on the phone that he will not supply weapons to Russia, I take him at his word. The Russian war in Ukraine – he adds – is a threat to the whole world”, and the promises of US armaments “for our defense”, including the coveted F-16s, are “good”.
ANNOUNCEMENTS OF NEW SANCTIONS They also arrive in Russia during the day from the United Kingdom, even if Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, less than a month before the elections which will overwhelm the Tories due to the polls, is a sort of dead man walking around among his colleagues who in all probability – as Politico notes – during this Apulian summit they will limit themselves to giving him embarrassed smiles of courtesy.
