WASHINGTON — President Biden said Thursday while hosting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House that he’s ordering the Pentagon to spend “all” congressionally approved aid to Ukraine before he leaves office — ahead of former President Donald Trump’s possible return to power.
As Zelensky looked on, Biden, 81, told reporters in the Oval Office that his Kyiv counterpart had “shared a preview of [his] plan to win this war” and that the US would bankroll the effort to defeat Russia’s nearly three-year-old invasion — moments before Trump posted a private letter from Zelensky seeking a meeting to social media.
“Today I’m proud to announce a new $2.4 billion package of security assistance. I’ve also directed the Pentagon to allocate all of the remaining security assistance funding that has been appropriated to Ukraine, period, by the end of my term, which is Jan. 20,” Biden said before Zelensky separately met with Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.
The White House said Biden was releasing $2.4 billion from the Pentagon’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative to spend on drones, ammunition and air defense, and approving $5.5 billion worth of US military equipment using “presidential drawdown authority” ahead of the end of the fiscal year Monday.
It’s unclear exactly how much congressionally appropriated money remains to be spent — though $3 billion in additional drawdown authority recently found due to a Pentagon accounting error remains unspent, Reuters reported.
The term “drawdown authority” describes the president’s ability to provide US military equipment from Pentagon stockpiles to another country. The congressionally approved funds are then spent to purchase new weapons to backfill American stockpiles.
Bipartisan majorities in Congress have approved $175 billion in aid for Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022 — including the most recent $61 billion appropriation approved in April.
A Pentagon infographic from August shows that about $20.1 billion of military aid remained unspent.
Another $58.4 billion had been “committed” to projects as of August — meaning that Congress had been notified of pending plans to spend the funds.
Trump, 78, and Zelensky have had a difficult relationship, with the then-president in 2019 stalling the dispensation of about $400 million in US aid to Kyiv while demanding that Zelensky launch an investigation of alleged Biden family corruption, for which Trump was impeached.
If Trump wins the Nov. 5 election over Harris, the Republican nominee says he will immediately negotiate an end to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, which Zelensky says he fears would mean ceding lands currently held by Moscow.
Zelensky told the New Yorker in an interview earlier this month that “my feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how” — while slamming Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, as “too radical.”
Trump returned fire on Wednesday — accusing Zelensky during a North Carolina rally of “making little nasty aspersions toward your favorite president, me” and putting much of the blame for the conflict, which has killed or wounded about 1 million people, on Biden, Harris and Zelensky.
On Thursday, Trump posted to Truth Social a letter from Zelensky that appeared to be an attempt to patch up the relationship — with Zelensky writing that “[y]ou know I always speak with great respect about everything connected to you” and that “I would really like for our meeting to take place, as part of our efforts to help us end this war in a just way.”
Trump posted the communication without comment, but told reporters Thursday afternoon he would meet the Ukrainian leader the next morning at Trump Tower.
“Biden and Kamala allowed [the war’s devastation] to happen by feeding Zelensky money and munitions like no country has ever seen before,” Trump told supporters Wednesday, deriding the Ukraine president as “probably the greatest salesman on Earth.”
“Ukraine is running out of soldiers. They’re using young children and old men because their soldiers are dying,” Trump said.
“We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal, Zelensky. There was no deal that he could have made that wouldn’t have been better than the situation you have right now. You have a country that has been obliterated.”
Ahead of her meeting with Zelensky on Thursday, Harris criticized Trump’s stance on Ukraine.
“We must stand with our allies and our partners. We must defend our democratic values and stand up to aggressors and and we must stand for international order rules and norms. Each one of these principles is at stake in Ukraine, and that is why Ukraine’s fight matters to the people of America,” Harris said.
“There are some in my country who would instead force Ukraine to give up large parts of its sovereign territory, who would demand that Ukraine accept neutrality and would require Ukraine to forego security relationships with other nations? These proposals are the same of those of Putin and let us be clear: They are not proposals for peace. Instead, they are proposals for surrender.”
Zelensky, making his own brief remarks ahead of meeting with Harris, said he would brief her on the recent Ukrainian counter-invasion of Russia — which is widely understood as a tactic to improve Kyiv’s bargaining power in peace talks — saying they would discuss “the Kursk region and what has been achieved.”
Some Republicans in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), are expressing concern about Zelensky’s role in the US election.
The GOP leaders on Wednesday said they believed that Zelensky served as a de facto campaign surrogate for Harris by making a Sunday appearance at an ammunition factor in Scranton, Pa. — with Johnson calling on Zelensky to dismiss Kyiv’s ambassador on the grounds of poor judgment in arranging the trip and Comer demanding records from the executive branch on the event’s planning.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed those criticisms at her regular briefing Thursday, saying “the Ukrainians asked” for the Pennsylvania visit before adding that “we would encourage the House Republicans to drop this.”
