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- BBC News World
25 April 2022, 08:01 GMT
image source, EPA
Lloyd Austin, Volodymyr Zelensky and Antony Blinken this Sunday in kyiv.
On an unscheduled trip to kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, US Secretaries of State and Defense Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin met with President Volodymyr Zelensky and announced $713 million in military funding.
They also appointed as the new ambassador in kyiv the veteran diplomat Bridget Brink, current emissary in Slovakia.
Brink will fill this position that has been vacant since the beginning of 2020, when the former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovic was removed from her post in kyiv during the Donald Trump administration.
US media reported that US President Joe Biden would make the official nomination on Monday.
Blinken and Austin’s visit is the highest level of US representatives to Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invasion.
image source, Getty Images
Bridget Brink will be the new US ambassador to Ukraine.
Financial and diplomatic support
At least half of the $713 million in military financing to support the war campaign will go to Ukraine, while the rest will be divided between NATO members and other regional allies.
In addition, the US will sell $165 million worth of ammunition to kyiv.
The US also announced that it was reviewing the security conditions in the Ukrainian capital and that it would reopen the embassy as soon as the situation allows, in a new diplomatic effort two months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The embassy remains closed with a temporary office set up in neighboring Poland. Embassy officials are expected to start making daily trips to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv in the coming days, according to US media reports.
image source, AFP
A visit shrouded in secrecy
Joe Inwood, reporting from Kiev
It seemed that the Americans wanted to keep the arrival of two of their top officials a secret until it was over.
Reporters were not invited and the trip it wasn’t even confirmed until the pair was safely in neighboring Poland.
Unfortunately for them, the Ukrainian president had a different idea and had told a roomful of journalists about the visit 24 hours in advance.
But that doesn’t seem to have damaged relations too much, as the US delegation promised another round of military aid direct and indirect.
The trip was also used as an opportunity to announce that the US embassy in kyiv would begin to reopen this week: with a new ambassador taking over the post that has been vacant for two years.
