In a major development, US Secretary of State Blinken, on Wednesday, announced a USD 2 billion arms deal for Ukraine. According to news agency AP, it contained mostly from a package approved last month. Further, he said that the United States could sign a bilateral security agreement with Ukraine within weeks.
He said during a press conference in Kyiv that the "heavy lifting" on the deal had already been done.
The announcement came Wednesday as Blinken was in Kyiv to reassure Ukraine of the US support as it attempts to fight off a new Russian offensive. At his final event Wednesday of a two-day visit to Kyiv, Blinken said the Biden administration had approved a $2 billion, medium- and long-term foreign military financing package for Ukraine.
The packages generally send US taxpayer money to American defence firms to manufacture and ship weaponry and other military supplies to the recipient country.
The aid announcement came after Russian forces launched an armoured ground attack on Friday near Ukraine's second city of Kharkiv in the northeast of the country and made small inroads, opening a new front in a war that has long been waged in the east and south.
The development also came merely five days after the US Department of Defense (DoD) announced additional security assistance to meet Ukraine's critical security and defence needs. It said that the announcement was the Biden Administration's fifty-seventh tranche of equipment to be provided from DoD inventories for Ukraine since August 2021. This Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) package has an estimated value of $400 million and includes capabilities to support Ukraine's most urgent battlefield requirements, including air defence, artillery rounds, armoured vehicles, and anti-tank weapons.
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