The United States will allocate $200 million in defense aid to Kyiv in fiscal year 2018, the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington reported on its Facebook page late on July 20.
“The mentioned resources will be assigned to provide our country with military vehicles and equipment, as well as other hardware, military-purpose services, logistics, and training for the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” the message reads.
“(This decision) is evidence of the inalterability of the U.S. position regarding support for Ukraine in resisting Russian aggression and an acknowledgment of the fact that Kyiv continues its consistent progress in defense and security reforms.”
The Ukrainian mission in Washington added that parts of the U.S. Department of Defense had already initiated procedures to sign contracts on military hardware supplies and services for the Ukrainian defense sector in 2018.
In total, the United States has provided at least $1.1 billion of defense aid, including lethal weaponry, to Ukraine since the outbreak of Russia’s war in the Donbas in 2014, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch said in Kyiv on July 10.
The United States has also reasserted its support for existing procedures to bring peace to Ukraine’s east, despite contradictory news out of Moscow.
Following U.S. President Donald Trump’s controversial summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 16 in Helsinki, Bloomberg reported that the Russian leader proposed holding a referendum in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Donbas.
On July 21, the White House said it would not endorse the proposal.
“To be clear: The Administration is not considering supporting a referendum in (eastern) Ukraine,” U.S. presidential spokeswoman Heather Nauert wrote on her Twitter page.
“A ‘referendum’ would have no legitimacy. We continue to support Minsk agreements for solving the conflict in Donbas.”
Previously, on July 20, Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had also strongly rejected the possibility of a Kremlin referendum in the country’s Russian-occupied eastern territories.
