US President Donald Trump has halted all US military aid to Ukraine in a bid to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into negotiations with Russia, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing senior US government officials.
According to an unnamed official in the US Defence Department, Washington will withhold all pending military assistance to Kyiv until Zelensky demonstrates a “good-faith commitment to peace”, in a move that shows how drastically US-Ukraine relations have soured since Trump took office in January.
While the full extent of the order is unclear, it applies to all military equipment that has not yet reached Ukraine, including weapons currently en route to the country, including those being held at the main US military transit hub in Poland.
“The president has been clear that he is focused on peace. We need our partners to be committed to that goal as well. We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a solution”, a White House official told CNN.
Reporting the decision, the network called it a “direct response to what Trump views as Zelensky’s bad behaviour” during a fractious exchange in front of reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, but added that Ukraine would likely be able to “sustain its current fighting pace for several weeks — perhaps until the start of the summer — before a US pause would begin to have a major effect”.