The United States will reopen its embassy in Ukraine soon, its top diplomat said on Monday after he and the U.S. defense secretary visited Kyiv, promising more military aid and hailing its success in pushing back Russia's invasion.
Both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the fact they were able to come to Ukraine's capital was proof of its tenacity in forcing Moscow to abandon an assault on Kyiv last month.
"What you've done in repelling the Russians in the battle of Kyiv is extraordinary and inspiring quite frankly to the rest of the world," Austin told President Volodymyr Zelenskiy at a meeting overnight after a train journey from Poland. "We are here to support you in any way possible."
Blinken praised Ukraine's achievement "in pushing back this horrific Russian aggression."
"In terms of Russia’s war aims, Russia has already failed and Ukraine has already succeeded," he told a briefing in Poland on their way back from Ukraine.
Austin said: "We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine."
The two-month-old war has killed or injured thousands, reduced towns and cities to rubble and sent more than five million people fleeing abroad. But Russian forces were forced to pull back from the outskirts of Kyiv in the face of stiff Ukrainian resistance and they have yet to capture a major city.
U.S. officials said the two pledged $713 million in new assistance for Ukraine and other countries in the region seen as potentially vulnerable to Russian threats.
An extra $322 million in military aid for Ukraine would take the total U.S. security assistance since the invasion began to about $3.7 billion, one official said.
Russia's ambassador in Washington said Moscow had sent a diplomatic note demanding a halt to U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia was trying to disrupt arms supplies to Ukraine from its allies by bombing its rail infrastructure, Ukraine's military command said in a Facebook post on Monday.
Russia's defence ministry said later its missiles destroyed six facilities powering the railways that were used to deliver foreign weapons to Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region.
