U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will attend his final meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at Ramstein Air Base in Germany next week, the Defense Department said Friday.
The group of more than 50 nations, also known as the Ramstein group, includes members of NATO as well as most of the European Union. It was formed by Austin in April 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two months earlier, and is designed to coordinate military support for Ukraine’s defense.
The meeting, originally scheduled for October, was postponed when U.S. President Joe Biden — who had been scheduled to chair a leaders-level meeting for the group — canceled his trip to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, according to Politico. The last full meeting of the group was held in September.
The meeting will come just over a week before President-elect Donald Trump is sworn into office. The futures of the Ramstein group and any U.S. support to Ukraine are in question, as Trump has been critical of the level of U.S. aid to the country. He also has expressed an interest in ending the fighting swiftly.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that Trump could be important in the outcome of the yearslong war between Ukraine and Russia.
“Trump can be decisive. For us, this is the most important thing,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with Ukrainian television.
“His qualities are indeed there,” Zelenskyy said about Trump. “He can be decisive in this war. He is capable of stopping [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, or, to put it more fairly, help us stop Putin.”
Trump has previously said he would be able to stop the war in Ukraine in one day, but he has never detailed how he would accomplish that.
Meanwhile, Agence France-Presse reported, citing local officials, that a Russian drone attack in the suburbs of the capital, Kyiv, early Friday killed one person and wounded four.
AFP said Russian forces have escalated their aerial strikes across Ukraine through the first weeks of winter, including a New Year’s Day drone attack targeting central Kyiv that killed two.
In a statement posted to Facebook and other social media accounts, acting Kyiv regional Governor Mykola Kalashnyk reported a truck driver had been killed when he was hit by debris from a Russian drone that had been shot down.
Also Friday, Ukraine’s General Staff of the Armed Forces reported that Russian troops were continuing to push forward in Donetsk Oblast, advancing near the key town of Pokrovsk. Ukraine’s General Staff recorded 138 clashes on the battlefield from Thursday to Friday.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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