WASHINGTON
\nUS Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Monday that Ukraine\u2019s gains over two years of fighting were all in doubt without new US funding, as NATO\u2019s chief visited to lobby Congress.
\nTens of billions of dollars in US aid has been sent to Ukraine since the invasion in February 2022, but Republican lawmakers have grown reluctant to keep supporting Kyiv, saying it lacks a clear end game as the fighting against President Vladimir Putin\u2019s forces grinds on.
\nAs NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg made the case on a visit to Washington, Blinken offered an increasingly dire picture of Ukraine\u2019s prospects without US approval of the so-called supplemental funding.
\n\u201cWithout it, simply put, everything that Ukrainians achieved and that we\u2019ve helped them achieve will be in jeopardy,\u201d Blinken told a joint news conference with Stoltenberg.
\n\u201cAbsent that supplemental, we\u2019re going to be sending a strong and wrong message to all of our adversaries that we are not serious about the defense of freedom, the defense of democracy,\u201d he said.
\n\u201cIt will simply reinforce for Vladimir Putin that he can somehow outlast Ukraine and outlast us,\u201d he said.
\nPresident Joe Biden has asked Congress to approve $61 billion in new aid to Ukraine.
\nBut the talks have bogged down as Republican lawmakers \u2014 furious over record flows of migrants over the US border with Mexico \u2014 demand major changes in immigration and border control policy in exchange for approving more money for Ukraine.
\nStoltenberg said he would meet US lawmakers on Tuesday and make the case that support for Ukraine was \u201cin our own security interest.\u201d
\n\u201cIt will be a tragedy for Ukrainians if President Putin wins but it will also make the world more dangerous and all of us more insecure,\u201d Stoltenberg said.
\n\u201cIt will embolden other authoritarian leaders \u2014 not only President Putin, but also North Korea, Iran and China to use force,\u201d he said.
\nWith many Republicans focused on opposing China, Stoltenberg said: \u201cToday it\u2019s Ukraine; tomorrow it could be Taiwan.\u201d
\nUS and NATO officials have acknowledged limited gains in a counteroffensive launched by Ukraine last year.
\nBut Stoltenberg said that Ukrainians in the longer term have defied expectations, taking back half of the territory seized by Russia which had expected a swift takeover.
\n\u201cThis idea that it doesn\u2019t help to help them \u2014 actually, the Ukrainians have proved the opposite,\u201d Stoltenberg said.
\nStoltenberg earlier met at the Pentagon with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and top US military officer General Charles \u201cCQ\u201d Brown and later at the White House with Jake Sullivan, Biden\u2019s national security adviser.
\nHe also appeared on Fox News, a favorite network of Republicans, and made the case that US weapons help US workers as they are made in the United States.
\nDonald Trump, the likely Republican candidate in the November presidential election, and who has often praised Putin, is urging Republican lawmakers to reject the immigration accord being negotiated in Congress \u2014 which would also torpedo aid for Ukraine.
\nStoltenberg visited after Turkiye gave its long-awaited green-light for Sweden to enter NATO.
\nHungary, led by nationalist Viktor Orban, is the remaining holdout but both Blinken and Stoltenberg expected approval soon.
\nStoltenberg said Orban told him that the Hungarian parliament will reconvene at the end of February.
\n\u201cI expect also in line with what he said that the parliament will then finalize ratification shortly after that,\u201d Stoltenberg said.
\nSweden and Finland \u2014 which joined NATO last year \u2014 had once hesitated to enter the alliance for fear of antagonizing Russia, but switched gears after the invasion of Ukraine, which has unsuccessfully sought membership.
\nTurkiye extracted concessions from Sweden on Kurdish militants in the country and US approval of a $23 billion sale of 40 F-16 warplanes \u2014 announced at the same time as a deal for more advanced F-35 jets for Turkiye\u2019s historic rival Greece, also a NATO member.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Monday that Ukraine\u2019s gains over two years of fighting were all in doubt without new US funding, as NATO\u2019s chief visited to lobby Congress. Tens of billions of dollars in US aid has been sent to Ukraine since the invasion in February 2022, but Republican lawmakers have …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60182"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60187,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60182\/revisions\/60187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}