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It’s never been easy for the leaders of the world’s largest economies to find common ground, but Russia’s war on Ukraine has made it even harder for the Group of 20 meeting to reach meaningful agreements this year.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, this year’s host, has pledged Ukraine won’t overshadow his focus on the needs developing nations in the so-called Global South, but the war has proved hard to ignore.

“New Delhi will not want to distract from the main agenda, which is to address issues of concern for the Global South,” said Nazia Hussain, an associate research fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

“So while there will be discussions on the emerging issues as a fallout of the war — supply chain security and decoupling, energy security, and food supply — the focus must remain on how to mitigate the fallout rather than debate the geopolitical/security aspects of the war.”

As leaders began arriving Friday, Indian diplomats were still trying to find compromise language for a joint communique.

Russia and China, which has been Moscow’s most important supporter in the war against Ukraine, have rejected drafts over a reference to Ukraine that said “most members strongly condemned the war,” the same language they signed off a year ago at the G20 summit in Bali

The European Union, meanwhile, has said compromise language suggested by India is not strong enough for them to agree to, while the U.K. said that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak planned to press G20 members to take a tougher line against Russia’s invasion.

Ending the summit without a communique would underscore how strained relations are among the world’s major powers.

European Council President Charles Michel told reporters Friday that it was important to give India space as it worked “actively, maybe sometimes discreetly, to maximize the chance for a communique.”

He said Russia had isolated itself from the world with the invasion of Ukraine, and that the EU and others were working to “encourage China to play a positive role at the global level and to defend the UN charter and to defend the sovereignty of Ukraine.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the Bali summit by video last year, but Modi has made a point of not inviting Ukraine to participate in this year’s event.

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised Zelenskyy to keep Ukraine in the discussions, telling him in a video call that the leaders posted on Instagram: “I’m disappointed that you won’t be included but as you know, we will be speaking up strongly for you.”

Founded in 1999, the G20 was initially a response to global economic challenges, but since then, geopolitical tensions have introduced more politics into the discussions, complicating its ability to work effectively, said Ian Lesser, vice president of the German Marshall Fund and director of its Brussels office.

The G20 encompasses the world’s wealthiest countries in the Group of Seven, including the U.S., Canada, Britain, Japan, Germany and the European Union as a bloc, along with Russia, China and others.

Russia’s attack on Ukraine and China’s growing assertiveness in the Asia-Pacific region have added friction, pitting some of the most powerful G20 countries directly against each other diplomatically, Lesser said.

“Having China and Russia in the room now is a very different question than it would have been a decade ago,” he said. “It is very difficult now for any of these large-scale summits to avoid the major issues of the issues of the day, and these major issues are very polarizing — the war in Ukraine, tensions in the Indo-Pacific, even climate policy — the things that are both at the top of the global agenda but also very difficult to address.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping will not be attending the G20 themselves, instead sending lower-level officials.

Russia and China did not indicate why their leaders were not attending, but neither have traveled much recently and both seem to be putting a greater emphasis on the more like-minded BRICS group of nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. That group agreed at its summit last month to expand to include Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Egypt and Ethiopia.

China’s relations with India continue to be strained over ongoing border disputes, but despite the decision to send Premier Li Qiang instead of Xi, Modi and Xi did discuss the issue face-to-face at the BRICS summit and China’s Foreign Ministry said Beijing considers India-China relations “generally stable.”

India also has historic ties with Moscow, but is on good terms with the U.S. too. Modi is hoping to use his country’s influence to bridge gaps between the wealthy nations that have been standing together to sanction Russia over the Ukraine war and the Global South.

About half of the G20 countries are found in the Global South — depending on how one defines it — and Modi hopes to add the African Union as a bloc member.

In preparation, he held a virtual “Voice of the Global South” summit in January and has emphasized issues critical to developing nations, including alternative fuels like hydrogen, resource efficiency, developing a common framework for digital public infrastructure and food security.

“For the Global South, India’s presidency is seen as an opportunity with immense potential to address developmental needs, particularly as Brazil and South Africa are set to take over the presidency of the G20 from India in 2024 in 2025 respectively,” Hussain said.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters before Biden’s departure that the president supported adding the African Union as a permanent member and that the president hoped this summit “will show that the world’s major economies can work together even in challenging times.”

The U.S. will also focus on many of Modi’s priorities, including reforming multilateral development banks, especially the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to help developing countries, Sullivan said. Biden will also call for “meaningful debt relief” for low- and middle-income countries, and seek to make progress on other priorities including climate and health issues.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Friday dismissed suggestions that the proposals are designed to counter China’s global lending and investment through its so-called Belt and Road Initiative.

Michel, the EU council president, said he had hope the summit would be productive.

“I do not think the G20 will resolve in two days all the problems of the world,” he said. “But I think it can be a bold step in the right direction and we should work to make it happen and support the Indian presidency.”
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Friday marks the first anniversary of the death of England’s Queen Elizabeth.  She died a year ago at her beloved Balmoral Castle in Scotland at age 96.  

Upon her death, her son, Charles, immediately became king.  

Charles says he and his wife, Camilla, will spend the day quietly at the Scottish royal castle.  

“In marking the first anniversary of Her late Majesty’s death and my Accession, we recall with great affection her long life, devoted service and all she meant to so many of us,” King Charles posted in an online statement.  

On the anniversary of her death, the royal family shared a rarely-seen photograph of the queen taken in 1968 by famed photographer Cecil Beaton. The photo had previously appeared in an exhibition of Beaton’s photographs. 
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Rescuers from across Europe rushed to a cave in Turkey on Thursday, launching an operation to save an American researcher who became trapped almost 1,000 meters below the cave’s entrance after suffering stomach bleeding.

Experienced caver Mark Dickey, 40, suddenly became ill during an expedition with a handful of others, including three other Americans, in the Morca cave in southern Turkey’s Taurus Mountains, the European Association of Cave Rescuers said.

While rescuers, including a Hungarian doctor, have reached and treated Dickey, it could be days and possibly weeks before they are able to get him out of the cave, which is too narrow in places for a stretcher to pass through.

In a video message from inside the cave and made available Thursday by Turkey’s communications directorate, Dickey thanked the caving community and the Turkish government for their efforts.

“The caving world is a really tight-knit group and it’s amazing to see how many people have responded on the surface,” said Dickey. ” … I do know that the quick response of the Turkish government to get the medical supplies that I need, in my opinion, saved my life. I was very close to the edge.”

Dickey, who is seen standing and moving around in the video, said that while he is alert and talking, he is not “healed on the inside” and will need a lot of help to get out of the cave. Doctors will decide whether he will need to leave the cave on a stretcher or if he can leave under his own power.

Dickey, who had been bleeding and losing fluid from his stomach, has stopped vomiting and has eaten for the first time in days, according to a New Jersey-based cave rescue group he’s affiliated with. It’s unclear what caused his medical issue.

The New Jersey Initial Response Team said the rescue will require many teams and constant medical care. The group says the cave is also quite cold — about 4-6 degrees Celsius.

Communication with Dickey takes about five to seven hours and is carried out by runners, who go from Dickey to the camp below the surface where a telephone line to speak with the surface has been set up.

Experts said it will be a challenge to successfully rescue Dickey.

Yusuf Ogrenecek of the Speleological Federation of Turkey said that one of the most difficult tasks of cave rescue operations is widening the narrow cave passages to allow stretcher lines to pass through at low depths.

Stretcher lines are labor intensive and require experienced cave rescuers working long hours, Ogrenecek said. He added that other difficult factors range from navigating through mud and water at low temperatures to the psychological toll of staying inside a cave for long periods of time.

Marton Kovacs of the Hungarian Cave Rescue Service said that the cave is being prepared for Dickey’s safe extraction. Passages are being widened and the danger of falling rocks is also being addressed.

Turkish disaster relief agency AFAD and rescue team UMKE are working with Turkish and international cavers on the plan to hoist Dickey out of the cave system, the European Cave Rescue Association said.

The rescue effort currently involves more than 170 people, including doctors, paramedics who are tending to Dickey and experienced cavers, Ogrenecek said, adding that the rescue operation could take up to two to three weeks.

The operation includes rescue teams from Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Turkey.

Dickey was described by the association as “a highly trained caver and a cave rescuer himself” who is well known as a cave researcher, or speleologist, from his participation in many international expeditions. He is secretary of the association’s medical committee.

Dickey was on an expedition mapping the 1,276-meter-deep Morca cave system for the Anatolian Speleology Group Association (ASPEG) when he ran into trouble about 1,000 meters down, according to Ogrenecek. He initially became ill on Saturday, but it took until Sunday morning to notify others who were above ground.

Justin Hanley, a 28-year-old firefighter from near Dallas, Texas, said he met Dickey a few months ago when he took a cave rescue course Dickey taught in Hungary and Croatia. He described Dickey as upbeat and as someone who sees the good in everyone.

“Mark is the guy that should be on that rescue mission that’s leading and consulting and for him to be the one that needs to be rescued is kind of a tragedy in and of itself,” he said.

A team of rescuers from Italy’s National Alpine and Speleological Rescue Team will be flying to Turkey on Thursday night. A total of around 50 rescuers will be at the entrance of the cave early Friday ready to participate in the operation directed by Turkish authorities.

The rescue teams hope that the extraction can begin on Saturday or Sunday. Kovacs said that lifting Dickey will likely take several days, and that several bivouac points are being prepared along the way so that Dickey and rescue teams can rest.

The cave has been divided into several sections, with each country’s rescue team being responsible for one section.

The Hungarian Cave Rescue Service, made up of volunteer rescuers, was the first to arrive at Dickey’s location and provided emergency blood transfusions to stabilize his condition. 
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South Korean officials say North Korea has likely been invited to join Russia and China for the first time in trilateral naval exercises that experts see as a response to the newly cemented strategic cooperation among South Korea, Japan and the United States.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is believed to have proposed the joint naval drills during a visit to Pyongyang in July, according to South Korean lawmaker Yoo Sang-bum. Yoo said National Intelligence Service Director Kim Kyou-hyun briefed about the proposal at a closed-door meeting on Monday.

China and Russia have held annual joint naval exercises for over a decade, but this would mark the first time that North Korea has been invited to participate. The development followed reports that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is expected to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin this month to discuss possible weapons transfers.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a press briefing on Thursday that she did not have information about the proposed drills with Russia and North Korea.

David Maxwell, vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy, told VOA the proposal for naval drills appeared to be “a direct response” to what he called “JAROKUS,” or “the new Japan-ROK-US security arrangement,” using an acronym for South Korea’s official name, the Republic of Korea.

He said that arrangement, sealed at a mid-August summit at the Camp David presidential retreat outside Washington, is “arguably the most important security arrangement in Northeast Asia in the 21st century and probably in the last seven decades.”

‘Authoritarian axis’

Maxwell said members of the Moscow-Beijing-Pyongyang “authoritarian axis” may also feel a need to counter other U.S.-led security alliances, including AUKUS (Australia, the U.K. and the U.S.), the QUAD (Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.) and NATO.

The United States, South Korea and Japan have conducted several joint ballistic missile defense drills of their own this year in response to North Korea’s missile launches.

At Camp David, the three countries agreed to hold annual multidomain trilateral exercises and exchange real-time missile warning data. They also committed to consult as necessary on military responses to common threats.

Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, said joint drills by Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang “will be pretty preliminary” in the beginning as the three militaries learn how to share information and communicate with each other.

“That doesn’t mean that’s where they’re going to end,” he said. “This would be the beginning of a whole sequence of naval drills and ground and air drills” in which the countries would most likely cooperate.

China and Russia have held annual naval drills since 2012, according to the Chinese Defense Ministry. The militaries of the two countries began training together in 2005, and in 2018, Beijing sent its ground troops and aircraft to join Russia’s Vostok exercises, according to the RAND Corporation.

In July, Beijing and Moscow held Northern/Interaction-2023 military exercises in the Sea of Japan. It was the first drill they had conducted near Japan.

Reports of the trilateral naval drills came just days before Kim is expected to travel to Russia’s far eastern port city of Vladivostok to attend the September 10-13 Eastern Economic Forum. While there, he is expected to meet Putin to discuss potential arms deliveries.

The New York Times, citing U.S. and allied officials on Monday, said Putin is likely to ask Kim for artillery shells and antitank missiles for use in his war in Ukraine, while Kim will probably ask for satellite technology and nuclear-powered submarines.

On Friday in North Korea, the state-run KCNA news agency said the country had held a “submarine-launching ceremony” on Wednesday that it said would bolster its naval force. Kim said equipping the navy with nuclear weapons is an urgent task as he inspected what KCNA described as tactical nuclear submarine “Hero Kim Kun Ok” on Thursday.

Assist to Russian army

Patrick Cronin, the Asia-Pacific security chair at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, said the North Korean weapons could “help the Russian army persevere in a primarily stalemated war in Ukraine.”

But even without the North Korean weapons, he said, Putin is likely to benefit from the trilateral naval drills because they would “help divert international attention from Ukraine” by “elevating security concerns for the United States and its allies in Asia.”

Mao, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said at a press briefing on Thursday that the potential arms negotiations between Moscow and Pyongyang are matters that relate to the two countries, and she declined to comment further.

But other experts said China also stands to benefit from anything that prolongs the war in Ukraine.

“The upside for Beijing … is that it depletes U.S. weapons stockpiles and makes it harder for the U.S. to fulfill weapons commitments to Taiwan,” said Dennis Wilder, who served as the National Security Council director for China in 2004-05.

“It also keeps significant U.S. forces focused on Europe and away from the Indo-Pacific,” he said.

Bennett at RAND said the U.S. and its allies had “depleted a lot of our weapons stocks, sending them off to Ukraine without adequately replacing anything.”

“We no longer have a two-major-theater war capability,” he said. “What do we do if all of a sudden we have three major wars?” including the war in Ukraine and potential conflicts over Taiwan and in the Korean Peninsula.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a press briefing Tuesday that Russia’s weapons were depleted as well.

Describing Russia’s outreach to North Korea as an act of desperation, he said Moscow finds it necessary only because the U.S. and its allies “have continued to squeeze Russia’s defense industrial base.”
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Russia’s cyber operations may not have managed to land the big blow that many Western officials feared following Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but Ukrainian cyber officials caution Moscow has not stopped trying.

Instead, Ukraine’s top counterintelligence agency warns that Russia continues to refine its tactics as it works to further ingrain cyber operations as part of their warfighting doctrine.

“Our resilience has risen a lot,” Illia Vitiuk, head of cybersecurity for the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), said Thursday at a cyber summit in Washington. “But the problem is that our counterpart, Russia, our enemy, is constantly also evolving and searching for new ways [to attack].”

Vitiuk warned that Moscow continues to launch between 10 and 15 serious cyberattacks per day, many of which show signs of being launched in coordination with missile strikes and other traditional military maneuvers.

“These are not some genius youngsters in search for easy money,” Vitiuk said. “These are people who are working on day-to-day basis and have orders from their military command to destroy Ukraine.”

Vitiuk said Russia has launched 3,000 cyberattacks against Ukraine so far this year, after carrying out 4,500 such attacks following its invasion in 2022.

In addition, he said Russian officials are targeting Ukraine with about 1,000 disinformation campaigns per month.

Last month, for example, the SBU uncovered and blocked a Russian malware plot that sought to infiltrate critical Ukrainian systems by using Android mobile devices captured from Ukrainian forces on the battlefield.

Russian officials routinely deny any involvement in cyberattacks, especially those aimed at civilian infrastructure.

But Russian denials have been met with skepticism in the West, and in the United States, in particular.

“The Russians are increasing their capability and their efforts in the cyber domain,” said CIA Deputy Director David Cohen, who spoke at the same conference in Washington.

“This is a pitched battle every day,” Cohen added, noting that the fight in cyberspace is far from one-sided.

“The Russians have been on the receiving end of a fair amount of cyberattacks being directed at them from a sort of a range of private sector actors,” he said. “There have been attacks on Russian government, some hack and leak attacks. There have been information space attacks on the TV and radio broadcasts.”

Both Washington and Kyiv agree Ukraine’s cyber defenses are holding, at least for now.

Vitiuk, though, expressed caution.

“This war is not a sprint, it’s a marathon,” he said. “Our enemy is evolving, and [there are] a lot of things we still need to do, and a lot of things we still need to adopt in order to make this victory come faster.”

Vitiuk also warned that Russia’s determination should not be taken lightly, pointing to Ukrainian intelligence showing that Moscow is looking for ways to expand the reach of its cyber operations against Kyiv.

“We clearly see that there is a national cyber offensive program,” Vitiuk said. “Now they implement offensive [cyber] disciplines in their higher education establishments under control of special services.”

“They start to teach students how to attack state systems, and it is extremely, extremely dangerous,” he said.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, are pledging deeper economic cooperation as the list of international sanctions on Russia grows. Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul.
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The United Kingdom pledged on Thursday to find the former army soldier suspected of terrorism who escaped from prison by hiding under a food delivery van.

Daniel Abed Khalife is believed to have escaped from a medium-security London prison on Wednesday by leaving the prison kitchen where he was working and fastening himself to the bottom of a van.

“Daniel Khalife will be found, and he will be made to face justice,” U.K. Justice Minister Alex Chalk told parliament on Thursday.

The 21-year-old terrorist suspect is now the subject of a nationwide manhunt, which includes enhanced security checks at ports and airports. But as of Thursday evening in the U.K., police said there had not been any confirmed sightings of Khalife.

Discharged from the British army in May, the former soldier was awaiting trial on offenses related to terrorism and the Official Secrets Act.

Khalife is accused of planting fake bombs at an army base in England and collecting sensitive personal information about soldiers from a U.K. Defense Ministry database. He is also accused of gathering information for Iran, the BBC reported.

Khalife denied all the charges against him.

At parliament on Thursday, Chalk also said there would be an immediate investigation into the prison’s protocols and the decision about where Khalife was held. A second independent investigation will take place at a later date, Chalk said.

“No stone must be left unturned in getting to the bottom of what happened,” Chalk said.

More than 150 investigators and police staff are on the case, according to Metropolitan Police Commander Dominic Murphy, who is the lead investigator.

Some information in this report came from Reuters and The Associated Press.
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A wealthy Russian businessman with ties to the Kremlin was sentenced Thursday to nine years in prison for his role in a nearly $100 million stock market cheating scheme that relied on secret earnings information stolen through the hacking of U.S. computer networks.

Vladislav Klyushin, who ran a Moscow-based information technology company that did work for the highest levels of the Russian government, was convicted in February of charges that include wire fraud and securities fraud after a two-week trial in federal court in Boston.

Authorities say he personally pocketed more than $33 million in the scheme, which involved breaking into computer systems to steal earnings-related filings for hundreds of companies — including Microsoft and Tesla — and then using that insider information to make lucrative trades.

Klyushin, 42, has been jailed in the U.S. since his extradition in 2021, and the more than two years he’s been detained will be credited to his prison term. He was arrested in Switzerland after arriving on a private jet and just before he and his party were about to board a helicopter to whisk them to a nearby ski resort. After he completes his sentence, he’s expected to be deported to Russia.

Klyushin, who walked into the courtroom in handcuffs, sat at a table with his attorneys and listened to an interpreter through headphones as lawyers argued over the sentence. At the advice of his attorney, he declined to address the judge before she sentenced him.

Four alleged co-conspirators — including a Russian military intelligence officer who’s also been charged with meddling in the 2016 presidential election — remain at large, and even though prosecutors allege in a court filing that they’re still “likely sitting at their keyboards,” they acknowledge that the four will likely never be extradited to the United States to face charges.

Prosecutors had sought 14 years in prison, saying a stiff punishment was crucial to send a message to overseas cybercriminals. Assistant U.S. Attorney Seth Kosto told the judge that Klyushin has accepted no responsibility for his crimes and that once he serves his sentence, he’ll return to Russia, where he is a “powerful person” with “powerful friends in the highest echelons of Russian society.”

“Hackers will be watching this sentence to decide whether it’s worth engaging in this kind of conduct,” Kosto said.

Prosecutors say the hackers stole employees’ usernames and passwords for two U.S.-based vendors that publicly traded companies use to make filings through the Securities and Exchange Commission. They then broke into the vendors’ computer systems to get filings before they became public, prosecutors said.

Armed with insider information, they were able to cheat the stock market, buying shares of a company that was about to release positive financial results, and selling shares of a company that was about to post poor financial results, according to prosecutors. Many of the earnings reports were downloaded via a computer server in Boston, prosecutors said.

Klyushin denied involvement in the scheme. His attorney told jurors that he was financially successful long before he began trading stocks and that he continued trading in many of the same companies even after access to the alleged insider information was shut off because the hacks were discovered.

Defense attorney Maksim Nemtsev called prosecutors’ prison request “draconian,” adding that there is “no reason to think that he would risk the well-being of his family again by committing crimes.”

His lawyers asked the court for leniency, saying Klyushin had no prior criminal history and has already been seriously punished. He spent months in solitary confinement in Switzerland while awaiting extradition to the U.S., and his company has lost multimillion-dollar contracts, his attorneys wrote.

Klyushin owned a Moscow-based information technology company that purported to provide services to detect vulnerabilities in computer systems. It counted among its clients the administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Ministry of Defense, according to prosecutors.

Klyushin’s close friend and an alleged co-conspirator in the case is military officer Ivan Ermakov, who was among 12 Russians charged in 2018 with hacking into key Democratic Party email accounts, including those belonging to Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Ermakov, who worked for Klyushin’s company, remains at large.

Prosecutors have not alleged that Klyushin was involved in the election interference.
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The United States and Britain on Thursday sanctioned 11 people who are part of the Russia-based Trickbot cybercrime hacking group, accusing it of targeting critical government infrastructure and businesses, along with hospitals, during the coronavirus pandemic.

A U.S. Treasury statement said the blacklisted targets included “key actors involved in management and procurement” for Trickbot, which it said has ties to Russian intelligence services.

Treasury undersecretary Brian Nelson said in a statement, “The United States is resolute in our efforts to combat ransomware and respond to disruptions of our critical infrastructure.”

Ransomware refers to the demand for payments to unlock computer services that cybercriminals have frozen.

British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said the sanctions are an attempt to disrupt Trickbot’s business model and strip officials of their anonymity.

“We know who they are and what they are doing,” he said in a statement. 

British officials said the Trickbot group had extorted at least $180 million from people around the world to restore their computer services.

In conjunction with the sanctions, which block any assets the Trickbot officials have in the United States and Britain, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed indictments against nine individuals in the gang.

The U.S. said that in one instance, the Trickbot group used ransomware against three medical facilities in the midwestern state of Minnesota, “disrupting their computer networks and telephones, and causing a diversion of ambulances.”

The U.S. said Trickbot workers “publicly gloated over the ease of targeting the medical facilities and the speed in which ransoms had been paid to the group.” 
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited a Ukrainian border guard site on the outskirts of Kyiv Thursday as he opened the final day of an unannounced two-day visit.

The tour included presenting four U.S.-provided mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles that are part of a group of 190 of the vehicles to be delivered in coming months.

Blinken also met with a Ukrainian team working to clear unexploded Russian ordnance at a farm where corn was grown for export.

“What’s hard to get our minds around is that one third of Ukrainian territory has mines or unexploded ordnance on it,” Blinken said.  

“Your work is having a profound impact on the lives of Ukrainians and on people around the world,” he said, noting Ukraine’s importance to global food supply.

Blinken Wednesday announced $1 billion in new U.S. aid for Ukraine, with $175 million in security aid that includes additional air defense equipment, artillery munitions, anti-tank weapons including depleted uranium rounds for previously committed Abrams tanks, and other equipment.

Asked whether he is concerned about sustaining support for that level of U.S. aid among American citizens and lawmakers, Blinken was optimistic.

“I was last here almost exactly a year ago,” he said. “And in that time, in the year since I was last here, Ukraine has taken back more than 50% of the territory that Russia has seized from it since February 2022. In the current counteroffensive, we are seeing real progress over the last few weeks.”

Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba said what is being decided in this war is not just about Ukraine, but about what the world is going to look like after the war is over. If Russia wins, other autocrats will be empowered to invade their neighbors, he said, asking, ‘If the West cannot win this war, what war can they win?”

However, on Capitol Hill, one Republican senator expressed concerns to VOA, saying he would like to see a definitive strategy from the Biden administration for Ukraine to win the war.

“I’d like to see an announcement coming from all the NATO members saying that they are willing to step up. … I just got back from a trip to Europe, and we encouraged our NATO allies to actually step up their game, and I would like to see that happen,” Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said.

The United States is the largest donor of military aid to Ukraine in total dollars. Other countries, including Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic, are making larger financial contributions to Ukraine relative to the size of their own economies, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany.

Some information in this report was provided by VOA congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson.
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