(LONDON) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in the United Kingdom on Monday for “substantive” talks with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who said ahead of the meeting that his country would supply Ukraine with hundreds of missiles and long-range attack drones.
“I will meet my friend Rishi. We will conduct substantive negotiations face-to-face and in delegations,” Zelenskyy said on Twitter.
UK officials said ahead of Monday’s meeting that they’d send hundreds of air defense missiles and long-range attack drones — with a range of over 200 km — to Ukraine to aid in the fight against Russia.
“These will all be delivered over the coming months as Ukraine prepares to intensify its resistance to the ongoing Russian invasion,” Sunak’s office said in a statement.
Zelenskyy’s visit to Chequers, the prime minister’s country house, came a day after the Ukrainian president made a surprise stop in Paris for talks Sunday night with French President Emmanuel Macron.
France in the coming weeks will send Ukraine “tens of armored vehicles and light tanks including AMX-10RC” and will train Ukrainian troops to use them, Marcon’s office said.
“Besides, France is focusing its effort in supporting Ukraine’s air defense capacities in order to defend its population against Russian strikes,” the Sunday statement from the Palais de l’Élysée said.
Zelenskyy in February had made another surprise visit to France and the United Kingdom seeking military aid, including advanced Western fighter jets.
ABC News’ Angus Hines and Ibtissem Guenfoud contributed to this story.
(NEW YORK) — An American citizen charged with spying in China has been sentenced to life in prison after it was revealed that he had been held for over two years.
Suzhou Intermediate Court announced the sentence against 78-year-old Liang Chengyun, also known as John Shing-Wan Leung, in a press release on Monday. Leung also held permanent residency in Hong Kong.
He “was found guilty of espionage, sentenced to life imprisonment, deprived of political rights for life, and confiscated personal property of RMB 500,000,” officials said in a statement translated by ABC News.
Leung had been arrested on April 15, 2021, by the Chinese State Security Bureau, an investigation agency similar to the FBI or CIA in the U.S., the court said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(ROME) — Italy’s government is on full alert following a national problem: skyrocketing Pasta prices.
Italy’s Minister of Enterprise and Made in Italy, Adolfo Urso, chaired an emergency meeting on Thursday, convening government officials, trade and consumer association representatives and distributors, for crisis talks to discuss soaring pasta costs, which have seen the Italian staple rise by more than double the rate of inflation, according to data from the European Central Bank.
The Rapid Price Alert Commission met for the first time since its establishment in March in Rome’s Palazzo Piacentini on Thursday, according to Italian outlet ANSA.
The price of pasta rose for two consecutive months, by 17.5% in March followed by a 16.5% rise in April – when compared to the same periods a year earlier, according to the Italian National Institute of Statistics.
This is despite the falling price of durum wheat, which has dropped by 30%, according to officials.
The crisis committee aimed to examine trends in pasta prices, monitor the dynamics that have contributed to the rising costs of pasta goods, as well as examine expectations for the coming months of the year.
“The meeting was particularly fruitful,” said the President of Coldiretti, Italy’s National Farmers Union, Ettore Prandini, following the crisis meeting. Coldiretti had said the situation was “an anomaly on which it is good to clarify,” arguing that the commission on expensive pasta underlines the “importance of having activated a control system on the supply chains linked to price trends.”
Italy’s government too, although refraining from capping prices, expressed similar hope that the market will correct itself.
“The latest price surveys are already showing the fist, albeit weak, signs of a price decrease, a sign that the cost of pasta may fall significantly in the coming months,” the government said in a statement.
Statistics show the average Italian eats about 23 kilos of pasta per year, according to consumer group Assoutenti. The southern European nation is also the world’s No. 1 pasta exporter, with statistics showing 2.4 million tons of pasta were exported in 2022.
(NEW YORK) — Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was granted two weeks of bail by Islamabad’s high court Friday, one day after the Supreme Court ruled his arrest on corruption charges was unlawful.
The ruling came in the wake of violent and unprecedented protests in Pakistan since Khan’s arrest on Monday.
At least six people have been killed and more than 150 were injured in protests across the country. Khan’s party claims the figures are much higher.
Much of the anger from protesters has been pointed at Pakistan’s powerful military, which Khan alleges played a major role in his ouster from government through a no-confidence vote in mid-April last year.
“The military itself feels fairly divided as far as its political thinking is concerned,” retired Lt. Gen. Talat Masood, a former three-star general in the Pakistani army and current political commentator, told ABC News.
Khan, who led Pakistan from August 2018 to April 2022, is facing hundreds of charges, mostly related to corruption. He has accused current Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of being behind the charges, and Khan still carries strong support among many Pakistanis.
Earlier this week, angry protesters breached the front gate of the the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, a move that shocked a country used to the military’s stronghold on Pakistan since its creation in 1947. Protesters also ransacked and set ablaze the official residence of the army’s commander in Lahore.
In response to the violent protests, the military said Wednesday it will exercise “patience and restraint” in the national interest, but added that all the “facilitators and planners” who were involved have been identified and will be punished according to the law.
Thousands of Khan’s supporters rallied in the capital, Islamabad, on Friday to celebrate his temporary release.
Khan has demanded an early election across the country ahead of the end of the incumbent government’s tenure in August. But that seems unlikely with the incumbent government aware it is facing inflation, a caving economy, rising unemployment, bad governance and the looming threat of terrorism.
On Friday, a major paramilitary base in Baluchistan province came under attack with the military’s elite commanders called to deal with the situation.
“The political situation couldn’t be more confrontational than what it is today,” said Masood, who added he doesn’t see things getting better with the present arrangement.
(LONDON) — The prime suspect in the unsolved 2005 disappearance of American teenager Natalee Holloway could soon be extradited from Peru to face criminal charges in the United States, ABC News has learned.
The Peruvian government issued an executive order on Wednesday accepting a request by U.S. authorities for the temporary extradition of jailed Dutch citizen Joran van der Sloot, who has been serving a 28-year sentence in Peru for the 2010 murder of Stephany Flores, a 21-year-old college student from a prominent Peruvian family. Upon arrival in the U.S., van der Sloot will face a federal trial on extortion and wire fraud charges stemming from an accusation that he tried to profit from his connection to the Holloway case.
“We will continue to collaborate on legal issues with allies such as the United States, and many others with which we have extradition treaties,” Edgar Alfredo Rebaza, director of Peru’s Office of International Judicial Cooperation and Extraditions of the National Prosecutor’s Office, said in a statement on Wednesday.
A source familiar with the matter told ABC News on Wednesday that van der Sloot’s extradition flight could happen as early as this weekend but will likely happen within a week. U.S. Marshals will accompany van der Sloot on the flight, which will depart from Lima. It was not immediately clear where exactly the plane would land in the U.S.
If van der Sloot is found not guilty of the charges, he will be returned to Peru to serve the remainder of his sentence there. If he is convicted, the Peruvian and U.S. governments will have to agree on where he serves his U.S. sentence as well as the rest of his Peruvian sentence.
Holloway, an 18-year-old from Mountain Brook, Alabama, vanished on the night of May 30, 2005, while celebrating her high school graduation with classmates on the Dutch Caribbean Island of Aruba. She was last seen leaving a bar called Carlos’n Charlie’s in Oranjestad and getting in a grey Honda with then-17-year-old van der Sloot and two of his friends.
Van der Sloot was identified as a suspect and detained weeks later but ultimately released without charge due to a lack of evidence. An Alabama judge later declared Holloway dead, though her body was never found. No charges have been filed in the case.
On June 30, 2010, a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted van der Sloot for allegedly trying to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from Holloway’s family after her disappearance.
Federal prosecutors alleged that on March 29, 2010, van der Sloot contacted Beth Holloway through her lawyer and claimed he would reveal the location of her daughter’s remains in exchange for $250,000 — $25,000 up front. During a recorded sting operation with the FBI, Beth Holloway’s attorney, John Q. Kelly, met with van der Sloot in a hotel room on Aruba, giving him $10,000 in cash as Beth Holloway wired $15,000 to van der Sloot’s bank account, according to prosecutors.
Then van der Sloot led Kelly to a location away from the hotel and changed his story about the night he had been with Natalee Holloway, prosecutors said. He now claimed he had picked her up but that she had demanded to be put down, so he threw her to the ground. He said her head hit a rock and she was killed instantly by the impact, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors said van der Sloot then took Kelly to a nearby home and claimed that his father, who had since died, buried Natalee Holloway’s body in the building’s foundation. Van der Sloot parted ways with Kelly after the exchange and later emailed him saying the information he had provided was “worthless,” according to prosecutors. Within days, van der Sloot had slipped away to Peru.
Natalee Holloway’s mother released a statement on Wednesday reacting to the news that van der Sloot, now 35, would be temporarily extradited from Peru to the U.S.
“I was blessed to have had Natalee in my life for 18 years, and as of this month, I have been without her for exactly 18 years. She would be 36 years old now,” Beth Holloway said. “It has been a very long and painful journey, but the persistence of many is going to pay off. Together, we are finally getting justice for Natalee.”
(MILAN) — A parked van exploded in a busy section of central Milan in Italy on Thursday morning.
The carabinieri — or Italian police — said that it was not clear what caused the van to explode in the Porta Romana neighborhood of the city and that no further details are currently available.
The explosion left several other nearby vehicles on fire as black smoke billowed into the sky in the downtown area.
(KYIV, Ukraine) — Six-year-old Sasha Pylypets watched, impassively, with a type of curious stare, as people threw handfuls of earth into her dad’s grave.
Days later, in another Ukrainian region, Tetyana Taranukha sobbed uncontrollably as she arched her grief-stricken body over her son’s flag-draped coffin.
She pressed her face down onto the wooden casket, hugging it with both arms, caressing the flag’s yellow-and-blue fabric with her neatly manicured hand.
Sasha’s dad, Oleksandr Pylypets, was 30. Tetyana’s son, Yuriy Taranukha, was 25.
Both men served in the Ukrainian army. They were both killed defending Ukraine against Russia’s invading army in a war which has now entered its 15th month.
It is unclear how many Ukrainian soldiers have died since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February of last year.
The Ukrainian government has never released figures and a suggestion by a top U.S. official last November that around 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been wounded or killed was denied by Ukrainian officials.
Over the past five months, Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region have largely been on the back foot.
Russia has, very slowly, taken land around the city of Bakhmut in a grinding, costly and, to date, unsuccessful offensive which Western officials say has “stalled.”
Ukrainian and Western officials consistently stress that Russia has lost many more men in the battle for Bakhmut. Moscow has denied a recent claim by U.S. officials that, in just the last five months of the war around 100,000 Russian troops have been killed or injured.
What can be said with certainty is that the fighting in the Donbas in recent months has been incredibly costly for both sides.
And accounts from Ukrainian soldiers provide us with insights into the scale of the loss.
Oleksiy Storozhez serves in an air reconnaissance unit in the northeastern Kharkiv region.
We met him on March 31, the day of the funeral of his friend, Yuriy Taranukha. The two men had worked construction together before the war in their local town of Zmiiv.
Storozhez said “a lot” of people who he knew in his local town had been killed in recent fighting, mainly in the area of Bakhmut, a city which Russia has been trying to capture for more than six months.
“There are funerals every day. Two or three people I know die every day,” Storozhez told ABC News.
Another soldier, Andriy Sheremet, who said he had been serving on the frontlines near to Bakhmut for around eight months said losses had sometimes been “notable,” however he added that Russian losses he had witnessed had been “much bigger.”
Visits to Ukrainian cemeteries also speak of the scale of sacrifice being made.
From one visit to the next, the long lines of blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags, each one marking the grave of a fallen soldier, grow longer. Freshly-dug graves, ready for the dead to be brought in, can often be spotted.
In one central cemetery in the western city of Lviv, ABC News counted around a hundred graves belonging to soldiers who were killed in the first three months of this year.
Oleg Rydvan was killed in Bakhmut in February. He was reportedly hit by shrapnel in the head after trying to rescue comrades who were surrounded by Russian forces.
In an interview with ABC News, his sister, Liudmyla Polio, described her brother as “a hero” who was killed while trying to save comrades who had become surrounded by Russian forces.
Liudmyla said her brother died for a cause, and, against the odds, helped Ukraine. The country’s forces have, so far, been able to hold onto Bakhmut in a battle that’s been bloody for both sides.
“We see coffins coming and coming,” Liudmyla said. “They are young men who are 30, 31. They had their whole life ahead of them.”
Liudmyla’s remaining brother, Slava, is still serving in the military and has vowed to take revenge against Russia for the death of his brother.
In the bitter and bloody battles in the trenches of eastern Ukraine, a soldier’s own mortality is unescapable.
Soldier Andriy Sheremet was a professional online poker player before Russia’s full-scale invasion and had no prior military experience. He said the only way to manage his intense fear was to “fully accept the possibility” he may die.
ABC News interviewed Andriy at a military rehabilitation center in the eastern Donbas.
Battle weary troops are sent there for two or three days to decompress, before they then return to ducking-down into the mud, out of the line of snipers and the constant thud of artillery and spray of shrapnel at their frontline positions.
The soldiers play table tennis, say prayers, are well fed, and are given trauma and meditation sessions before going back to what a military priest, Father Mykhailo, described as “hell on earth.”
For the soldiers serving in such hellish conditions there is also fear of a crude and simple concept; that to survive they almost certainly will have to kill, or be killed.
For many men, the ability to kill the enemy on the frontlines is automatic, explained Maryna Berko, a military psychologist at the rehabilitation center.
However, she said men with no previous military background can panic that life can begin to seem so fragile that they fear being dehumanized to such an extent that “they will not be able to return over the edge which they have crossed”.
Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion however means Ukrainians, perhaps understandably, rarely spare much thought for the enemy.
In order to cope with his fear of his own death, Andriy Sheremet said he isolated himself from bad thoughts and remained focused “on achieving victory.”
He says, he will, in the future, try and comprehend the current phase of his life.
When on the frontlines, soldier Oleksiy Storozhez said he “begs and prays” to come home “alive and unscathed.”
His biggest fear of being killed is the pain it would cause to his family. However protecting his daughter and wife from invading Russian forces is one of his main motivations to fight.
“I am fighting for my daughter, for her future”, Oleksiy said. “So she does not see, what we see on the front lines.”
Andriy Sheremet said he is partly driven by his desire to return to his former life and “the happiness from a simple walk in the park” or “drinking coffee in the morning with his wife.”
As Ukraine promises a major new offensive, it is almost certain that many more Ukrainian soldiers will be killed.
The inevitable apprehension about what the future months will bring is mixed with that trademark Ukrainian defiance.
Serhiy Pylypets fought back tears after burying his son at his funeral near Kyiv.
“No-one should have any doubt,” he said.
“Ukraine will win, but we will celebrate with tears in our eyes.”
ABC News’ Sohel Uddin, Natalya Kushnir, Yulia Drozd, Natalya Popova, Joe Sheffer and Bruno Roeber contributed to this report.
(MEXICO CITY) — When Emiliano, 51 years old, finally reached Mexico from his native Venezuela, he was detained by Mexico’s immigration authority, known by its Spanish-language initials as INM.
Imprisoned in a crowded room, he said he and other migrants were never given medications or access to their phones, even to let family know where they were.
“When you enter that place, you lost your human rights,” Emiliano, identified by only his last name to protect his identity, told Human Rights Watch, per the human rights monitor’s recent report. “There were so many of us, we slept one on top of the other … Half of us have COVID-19 symptoms. I was afraid I would die.”
Emiliano’s experience is one of hundreds of thousands of migrants who have overwhelmed Mexico’s migration authorities. But in an 11th-hour deal with the Biden administration, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has agreed to an unprecedented step — accepting non-Mexican migrants expelled by the U.S. under normal legal conditions.
“This agreement now where people of many nationalities can be expelled from the United States to Mexico is going to expose tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to danger, to abuses, to violence in ways that we’ve seen now for years,” said Tyler Mattiace, the Mexico researcher for Human Rights Watch and one of the authors of that recent report.
President Joe Biden and López Obrador, often known by his initials as AMLO, spoke Tuesday as the U.S. prepares for an influx of migrants following the end of Title 42 restrictions, a public health policy used by the Trump and Biden administrations to expel migrants nearly 2.8 million times, even before they could request asylum.
“We’ve gotten overwhelming cooperation from Mexico,” Biden said after their hour-long call, pointing to the joint statement the U.S. and Mexico released last week announcing the new agreement.
But critics, including some U.S. lawmakers and human rights groups, say the U.S. has been shirking responsibility for enforcing immigration policy under Title 42, the Trump-era policy that authorized the rapid expulsion of migrants in a purported effort to avoid the spread of COVID-19.
“Title 42 was the latest example of the U.S. outsourcing law enforcement and migration and refugee policies not only to Mexico, but also to other countries,” said Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty International’s Americas director, adding Biden is now “taking advantage of the apparatus that was left by the Trump administration.”
That outsourcing takes different forms, from pushing other countries to increase their border security and deportations to increasing visa restrictions for foreigners to creating processing centers in other countries.
But Mexico in particular has taken on unprecedented responsibility for U.S. migration policies, and with the country overwhelmed by record numbers of migrants, critics like Guevara Rosas say the results are increasingly deadly and in violation of U.S. and international law.
“The government of Mexico, including President López Obrador’s administration and the previous administration from different political parties, have been complicit in the committing of human rights violations against migrants and refugees that include massive pushbacks, forcibly returning people to countries where they are in danger, and not committing to provide protection to people who are stuck at the border in these communities that are experiencing high levels of violence,” she told ABC News.
After Title 42 ends Thursday, the U.S. will soon shift to new, more restrictive asylum policies, including making migrants ineligible if they enter the U.S. without permission or even fail to apply for protection in another country. For migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, that could mean immediate expulsion to Mexico, rather that removal flights to their own countries — a policy that started under Title 42, but Mexico has now agreed to continue.
A spokesperson for the Mexican Foreign Ministry did not respond to ABC News’ questions. A Biden administration official didn’t address questions about the risks to migrants in Mexico, saying only, “President Biden has led the largest expansion of legal pathways for protection in decades.”
The latest example of that violence came just six weeks ago when at least 39 migrants detained by INM were killed in a fire. The doors at the facility were locked, and guards were seen on surveillance footage fleeing without opening them.
INM’s chief, a close AMLO ally, was charged earlier this month for “unlawful exercise of public office,” although he remains out of jail and in his role. Mexico’s attorney general’s office said he and another high-level official failed “to complete their obligations to monitor, protect, and provide security to people and facilities under their charge, promoting crimes committed against migrants.”
But the detention center in Ciudad Juárez is not the first fire to kill detained migrants, and it’s not the only one where migrants have complained of severe overcrowding and poor conditions.
Mexico detained nearly 450,000 migrants in 2022 — an increase of 44% over the year before and the highest ever recorded — but its roughly five-dozen detention centers have capacity for less than 7,000 people, according to federal data. That makes Mexico’s migrant detention program one of the largest in the world, with monitoring groups reporting some facilities — like the one Emiliano was detained in — lack access to running water, electricity, or medical care.
Mexico’s own National Human Rights Commission has documented similar poor conditions, especially overcrowding, as well as the detention of children in violation of Mexican law.
López Obrador has repeatedly cast himself as a friend to migrants and rhetorically defended the right to seek asylum. But under U.S. pressure, he’s increasingly relied on the military to act as immigration enforcement, deploying tens of thousands of National Guard troops to help detain migrants who are in the country illegally. Those detentions, including at checkpoints across the country and through random raids and searches, were declared unconstitutional by Mexico’s Supreme Court last year, particularly for targeting Black, brown, or Indigenous people.
But little has changed since that ruling, and migrants’ rights advocates say INM agents continue to mistreat migrants. A 2022 Human Rights Watch report documented INM agents expelling migrants seeking asylum, pressuring would-be asylum-seekers to sign papers to accept deportation, using violence to stop migrants’ movements and extorting migrants for money.
More than INM, however, most of those abuses have been carried out by criminal groups, who have trafficked, kidnapped, assaulted, extorted and killed thousands of migrants traveling through Mexico — especially those who have been waiting at the U.S.-Mexican border for a chance to cross.
Since President Joe Biden took office, there were at least 13,480 reports of murder, torture, kidnapping, rape and other violent attacks on migrants and asylum-seekers blocked in or expelled to Mexico under Title 42, according to the human rights group Human Rights First. Their report documenting those incidents, published in December, was “just a small fraction of the true number,” according to Julia Neusner, the group’s research and policy associate attorney.
“Organized crime is the one that has benefited more from these policies than anyone,” Guevera Rosas told ABC News.
Biden administration officials have said their rollout of additional legal pathways, their encouragement to migrants to not travel to the border, and their plans to open refugee processing centers in Latin America are all meant to undercut organized crime, including the coyotes who traffic migrants.
While migrants’ rights groups welcome those pathways, they argue it shouldn’t undercut migrants’ rights to seek asylum in the U.S. as well — a right that is enshrined under U.S. law, even if a migrant crosses the border illegally.
“It doesn’t seem that the goal of any of these policies is to streamline asylum. It seems like the goal of these policies is to make it more complicated for people to apply for asylum,” said Mattiace, adding, “It’s clear that Mexico’s immigration policies are centered around preventing people from reaching the U.S. border.”
(LONDON) — A woman is lucky to be alive after she was stranded for five days in thick Australian bushland and managed to survive on some candy and a bottle of wine, police said.
The incident occurred when the 48-year-old woman — identified by the Wodonga Police only as Lillian — was making a journey to Bright, Australia, for a short vacation when she reportedly didn’t make her daily call to check in with loved ones on April 30 and they were able to raise the alarm to authorities that something was wrong.
Emergency services immediately began to search for the missing woman in the areas of Mitta Mitta, Wodonga, Bright and Albury — all approximately 200 miles northeast of Melbourne and about 40 miles away from the nearest town — but were unable to find any sign of Lillian for five days.
There was a break in the case last Friday when the police Air Wing from Wodonga Police were conducting a sweep of the hilly terrain in the area when they managed to spot Lillian’s car at the end of a dirt road in the Mitta Mitta bushland, police said.
“Lillian was found a good 60km away from the nearest town and due to health issues she was unable to try and walk for help so stayed with her car,” said Wodonga Police Station Sgt. Martin Torpey in a statement following the incident. “She used great common sense to stay with her car and not wander off into bushland, which assisted in police being able to find her.”
A local police van was directed by the helicopter that was conducting a sweep of the area to her location where she was located alive and well, police said.
Lillian had been attempting to drive to Dartmouth Dam when she hit a dead-end road at the end of Yankee Point Track and realized she had taken a wrong turn, according to authorities. But when she tried to turn around and backtrack to where she came from, her car became stuck in some mud and she was unable to call for help due to lack of mobile phone coverage in the area.
“She was only planning a short-day trip so had only taken a couple of snacks and [candy] with her but no water. The only liquid Lillian, who doesn’t drink, had with her was a bottle of wine she had bought as a gift for her mother so that got her through,” Torpey said.
“While she couldn’t move her car, she was able to use the heater overnight give her some warmth,” Torpey continued. “After being lost in the bush for five days, she was extremely relieved and grateful to see us and we were just as happy to see her.”
Lillian was subsequently taken to the hospital for observation and to be treated for dehydration suffered from her five-day ordeal. She is expected to fully recover.
(WASHINGTON) — The Pentagon on Tuesday announced a new commitment of $1.2 billion in military aid for Ukraine.
The package includes air-defense systems to help Ukrainian forces defend against a near-constant barrage of Russian strikes.
The aid also includes equipment to help “integrate Western air defense launchers, missiles, and radars with Ukraine’s air defense systems,” according to the Pentagon.
“We’re going to continue to rush air-defense capabilities and munitions to help Ukraine control its sovereign skies and to help Ukraine defend its citizens from Russian cruise missiles and Iranian drones,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a briefing Tuesday.
At the same time, Ryder confirmed Ukrainian forces thwarted the Russian Kinzhal missile using an American-made Patriot system when asked during the briefing with reporters.
“We can confirm that the Ukrainians took down this Russian missile with a Patriot missile defense system,” Ryder said.
The new $1.2 billion in U.S. military aid will come from the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which the U.S. uses to purchase weapons and equipment from the defense industry or from partner nations on behalf of Ukraine.
Because the process involves defense contracts and, when not already on shelves, the need to build the requested items, it can take months or years before it reaches Ukraine.
Because of this, USAI represents longer-term support for Ukraine. For more immediate support, the U.S. has used another means called Presidential Drawdown Authority, which pulls equipment from existing American stockpiles to be sent to Ukraine.
“The United States will continue to work with our allies and our partners to provide Ukraine with capabilities to meet its immediate battlefield needs and longer term security assistance requirements,” Ryder said.
The new USAI funds will also go toward artillery rounds, commercial satellite imagery services, and ammunition for anti-drone weapons.
The new $1.2 billion package will take the total USAI funds committed to Ukraine so far in fiscal year 2023 to roughly $5 billion. It will take total U.S. security assistance since the beginning of Russia’s invasion in February of 2022 to nearly $37 billion.
During a press availability at the State Department Tuesday, the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary James Cleverly was reserved when asked to comment on reports that the U.K. is preparing to send long-range missiles to Ukraine, weaponry Kyiv has long coveted and that the Biden administration has declined to supply.
“I’m sure you understand that anything to do with operational details, about the nature the timing, the scale of our support would be counterproductive for us to discuss publicly,” he said.
But Cleverly staunchly defended the support provided by the U.S. and the speed at which it has reached Ukraine.
“It is the largest donor of the allies. So I wouldn’t want to imply that there’s either competition in between us or anything else,” he said. “We have worked in close coordination from the very start,” he said.
“The natures of our militaries is different,” he continued. “The natures of our political system is different. There are some things that the UK is able to do more quickly because of the nature of our political system. And there are some things that the American system allows them to do different and better. It’s not about always trying to replicate what our allies do.”
