WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden on Thursday announced an $8 billion “surge” in “security assistance” to Ukraine, including supply of a glide bomb that will enhance Kyiv’s strike capability against Russia. Moscow has warned that use of missiles that can strike deep into Russia could trigger nuclear retaliation.
The White House announcement of the military aid, which came ahead of Zelenskyy‘s meeting with Biden and Kamala Harris in Washington, drew a furious response from the MAGA leadership and its rank and file, which is accusing the Ukrainian leader of bilking American taxpayers and leading the US into a world war.
MAGA supremo Donald Trump denounced Zelenskyy as the “greatest salesman in history” saying at a rally that “every time he comes into the country, he walks away with $60 billion,” while arguing the US is stuck in the Ukraine-Russia war and will not be able to get out unless he becomes president.
“Biden and Kamala ­got us into this war in Ukraine, and now they can’t get us out. I think that we’re stuck in that war unless I’m president. I’ll get it done. I’ll get it negotiated, I’ll get out. We gotta get out. Biden says, ‘We will not leave until we win.’ What happens if they win?” Trump, who is seen as a Russian stooge by Washington’s establishment traditionalists, said at a rally.
“Zelenskyy’s only strategy for victory is to embroil us in World War III. And VP Harris is all for it,” Trump’s surrogate Robert Kennedy Jr tweeted, as MAGA principals raged at the Ukrainian leader being flown to Pennsylvania on a US military plane to visit a munitions factory, and subsequently making remarks critical of Trump’s running mate JD Vance, which MAGA surrogates claimed is tantamount to election interference.
While many MAGA associates are transparently pro-Russia, Kamala Harris too is openly playing for the votes of 800,000 Polish-Americans in Pennsylvania, a battleground state. Poland is Ukraine’s neighbor and fears Russia.
Domestic politics aside, apprehension that the world could stumble into a nuclear war is coursing through geo-political circles after Russia’s President Vladimir Putin announced that Moscow will revise its nuclear doctrine to respond with nuclear weapons to any attack carried out with conventional weapons that creates “a critical threat to our sovereignty.”
Russia would treat “aggression against Russia by any nonnuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state” as a “joint attack on the Russian Federation,” Putin said in remarks that experts said significantly lowered Moscow’s nuclear threshold, putting Ukraine, UK, and even US in its crosshairs.
There is growing concern that the supply of increasingly sophisticated weapons by the US and its allies to Ukraine, including long range ballistic missiles, may be crossing a red line that Moscow is warning about with increasing urgency. Following the long-range Storm Shadow cruise missile Britain has supplied to Ukraine, Biden’s package announced Thursday includes a glide bomb formally called the Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW).
Ukraine is pressing US and Britain for use of these weapons to strike deep into Russia, which Moscow has indicated will change the dynamics of the war and its response. While US officials have indicated Biden will not immediately green light its use, London and Washington are said to be reviewing Kyiv’s request.