Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has flown to Washington DC in an attempt to rescue a critical $61bn military aid package, while the UK separately hinted that it could increase the value of the arms, ammunition and training that it donates to Kyiv.
Zelenskiy is due to meet the US president, Joe Biden, on Tuesday, as well as US senators and the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, at a time when Congress is holding up future American financial support for Kyiv’s war effort.
Shortly after arriving in the US capital, Zelenskiy said Ukraine was counting on the US, and that delays to future rounds of military aid were “dreams come true” for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
“Putin must lose,” Zelenskiy said in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC. “You can count on Ukraine, and we hope just as much to be able to count on you.”
I wonder if the war would actually end and if Russia would cede territory if/when Putin dies and Ukraine is still fighting? Has the Russian military machine gained so much momentum that no matter who takes over after Putin is gone, they’ll just continue the war out of fear of looking weak? I think there’s this notion that the only thing still driving this war is Putin himself, but it seems like Russia has transitioned to a permanent wartime economy, I doubt they could just turn on a dime when Putin isn’t there anymore. Potentially the country could devolve into a civil war and the occupied territories will just slip out of their grasp and back into Ukraine’s, but that’s not a certainty.