Defense Secretary Austin visits Ukraine amid Russian gains and ahead of imminent US election

Kyiv, Ukraine (CNN) — Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin arrived in Kyiv early Monday morning, as the future of US aid to Ukraine hangs in the balance of the imminent US presidential election and as Russia continues to make small but steady gains on the battlefield.

Austin met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov while in Kyiv to discuss Ukraine’s weapons needs and how the US can continue to support the country’s military over the next year.

After their meeting, Zelensky wrote on X that he discussed expanding the use of long-range strike capabilities against Russian military targets.

A US defense official said that during their meeting, Austin emphasized to Zelensky the importance of Ukraine defending the territory it has taken inside Russia’s Kursk region and capitalizing on those gains, as well as fending off the Russians in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk. They also discussed how Ukraine can shore up its manpower, as the military has struggled lately with force regeneration and recruitment.

Much of Austin’s later meeting with Umerov and Ukrainian Armed Forces commander Oleksandr Syrskyi was also focused on Kursk, the defense official said, and the officials drilled down on military planning there for the next several months.

The secretary’s visit was also meant to serve as a moment for him to “step back” and look at the “arc” of the US-Ukraine relationship over the last two and a half years of war, a senior defense official said.

It was not a victory lap, however. The Ukrainians are in a “very tough” situation against the Russians heading into winter, the official noted.

That is despite the heavy Western sanctions imposed on Russia’s economy in response to its invasion, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment the US has surged to Ukraine, and the multinational coalitions that the Biden administration rallied from the earliest days of the war to help Ukrainian troops beat back Russian advances.

Loud explosions were heard in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in the early hours of Monday local time, according to a CNN producer on the ground, in a stark illustration of the daily bombardments the country still faces more than 2.5 years into Moscow’s grinding war. City authorities said air defenses have been activated.

Austin, and the Biden administration more broadly, sees multinational coalitions as a key aspect of his legacy as defense secretary, particularly the Ukraine Defense Contact Group — an alliance of 57 countries and the European Union that Austin first convened two months into the war to coordinate immediate military aid to Ukraine.

“It’s been absolutely remarkable that Ukraine has been able to do what it’s done,” Austin told reporters traveling with him on Sunday night. “It’s been able to do that, of course, because of the fact that we have supported them from the very beginning, and we’ve rallied some 50 countries to be a part of that support.”

In his speech at the Kyiv Diplomatic Academy on Monday, Austin rebuffed critics who say the US should not be spending so much money on Ukraine.

“For anyone who thinks that American leadership is expensive — well, consider the price of American retreat,” he said. “In the face of aggression, the price of principle is always dwarfed by the cost of capitulation. Our allies and partners know that. And I’ve been proud to watch the pro-Ukraine coalition dig deep.”

US officials hope the coalitions will endure, but a potential Donald Trump victory has thrown much of that into doubt. The former president declined last month to say whether he wants Ukraine to win the war, and he has described Zelensky as a “salesman” who “should never have let that war start.”

Austin appeared to allude to that comment in his speech, as well, saying: “We refuse to blame Ukraine for the Kremlin’s aggression. We refuse to offer excuses for Putin’s atrocities. And we refuse to pretend that appeasement will stop an invasion.”

The senior defense official said the Pentagon is still planning as though the US’ support will continue, and Austin said Friday that “every day, we are building long-term capability to Ukraine.”

“None of us are strangers to political uncertainty in the US, or in Ukraine for that matter,” the defense official said.

US officials are also banking on the hope that bipartisan support for Ukraine will remain in Congress. But that, too, is far from inevitable — there has already been one major fight on Capitol Hill this year about approving additional funding for Ukraine, a dispute fueled by far-right Republicans opposed to Ukraine aid whose influence will only grow under a potential Trump administration.

A murky path to Ukrainian victory

Austin arrived on Monday in a country still waging a brutal fight for its existence. Zelensky has ruled out ceding any territory to the Russians and continues to lobby for Ukraine’s integration into NATO as the best path to victory.

“The first point is an invitation to NATO, now,” Zelensky said last week, referring to the first point of his “victory plan” that he has presented to the US, Europe and NATO.

Paradoxically, though, NATO is unlikely to accept Ukraine as a member as long as the country is at war.

Ukraine has prevented Russian President Vladimir Putin from achieving “one single strategic objective” during the war, Austin said Sunday. But the secretary did not articulate the West’s vision for how Ukraine can decisively win.

Russian troops have continued to take Ukrainian territory, are outfiring the Ukrainians 3-to-1 on the battlefield, and maintain a “significant” advantage in personnel and munitions, a senior NATO official said last week. Meanwhile, Iran has sent Russia three shipments of ballistic missiles this year, and North Korea has provided 11,000 containers of ammunition and appears to be preparing to deploy troops to fight for Russia in Ukraine. China also continues to be a “critical enabler” of Russia’s war effort, the NATO official said.

To be sure, the war has come at a steep cost for Russia, which suffered more than 1,250 casualties per day in September, the highest rate since the war began, the official said. But Moscow is also mobilizing 30,000 new troops per month and manufacturing more than 3 million munitions per year, a pace it can likely continue for at least “the next few years,” the official added.

Ukraine has more sophisticated weaponry thanks to the West, which could give the country a strategic edge, the defense official said. “In terms of the capabilities, Ukraine is in a much stronger position this year than they were a year ago,” the official said. The flow of donations of ammunition is also “much steadier” and “more predictable” now, the official added.

But Russia maintains the advantage in terms of sheer mass of personnel and munitions. And the US is still not prepared to allow Ukraine to use US-provided long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia, which Zelensky has repeatedly requested.

Ukraine has instead been using its domestically produced long range drones to strike targets inside Russia. Umerov, the Ukrainian defense minister, said on Monday that Ukrainian drones have destroyed 200 military facilities inside Russia so far.

Still, Austin said he is confident that the US and its allies will continue to step up into the next year to support Ukraine, whoever is in power.

“I do think allies and partners will continue to rise to the occasion,” he said Sunday night. “And we’ve invested in things that will soon come to fruition, in terms of additional systems like NASAMS (surface-to-air missiles). We made those investments a year and a half, two years ago, and we’ll start to see some of that come to life here soon.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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