During a meeting with the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) commanders on Monday in Latvia, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, asked for more military and defence help right away.
“Russian aggression must and can be stopped.” Our current task is to accelerate it. “I implore you to take immediate action to hasten the defeat of the occupiers at this summit,” he urged.
Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway make up the U.K.-led force; eight of the countries in the group are also NATO members, with Finland and Sweden now not a part of the organization.
Early on Monday morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a rare trip to Minsk and praised working together with Belarus, which is a neighbour and ally. This made people in Kiev worry that plans are being made for a coordinated ground offensive.
Serhiy Nayev, commander of the joint forces of Ukraine, said he hoped that President Putin and President Lukashenko of Belarus would talk about “further aggression against Ukraine and the wider involvement of the Belarusian armed forces in the operation against Ukraine, especially, in our opinion, on the ground.”
After Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine in February, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has said many times that he has no plans to send his country’s military into Ukraine.
During the press conference, Putin stated that “Russia has no interest in absorbing anyone.” “There is absolutely no benefit to doing this.” “Aligning policies is what it is, not a takeover.”
Ned Price, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, responded to a question about this statement by saying it should be viewed as having the “height of irony,” given that it came “from a leader who is currently aiming to forcefully absorb his other peaceful next-door neighbor.”
Price warned that Washington would continue to keep a close eye on Belarus and would react “appropriately” if it continued to assist Putin.
The idea that Putin wants to pressure Belarus into taking a more active role in the conflict has been rejected by the Kremlin. A Kremlin spokesman named Dmitry Peskov told the news agency RIA Novosti that these rumours were “baseless” and “stupid.”
At the Monday meeting, none of the media present questioned Putin or Lukashenko about the conflict.
Both leaders mostly talked about how excited they were for Sunday’s World Cup soccer final in Qatar and how the two former Soviet states are getting closer together economically and for defense.
At one point, Lukashenko referred to Putin as his “elder brother” and lauded Russia as a comrade that had “reached out its hand to us” by giving Belarus reduced access to its oil and gas supplies.
Even though there has been no official announcement, U.S. officials say they are getting ready to send a Patriot missile air defence battery to Ukraine to help shoot down Russian airstrikes that are coming.
Russia has said that the action the U.S. is planning to take is a provocation that will make the U.S. more involved in the crisis.
Reuters, Agence France-Presse, and The Associated Press all contributed information to this article. This report was given by Margaret Besheer, a VOA U.N. correspondent.
