Top U.S. officials said that Russia had failed to achieve its war aims in Ukraine and that one of America’s top goals for its support of Ukraine is to weaken Russia so that it would no longer be capable of invading its neighbors.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were speaking to reporters in Poland today after returning from a trip to Kyiv, where they met Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.
Their comments follow an abrupt shift from Moscow, with a top Russian general saying that the goal of the invasion is now to seize vast swaths of Ukraine’s territory to connect Russia with Crimea and Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova. That has raised alarm about a potential Russian invasion of Moldova as well.
“When it comes to Russia’s war aims, Russia is failing, Ukraine is succeeding,” Blinken said. “Russia has sought as its principal aim to totally subjugate Ukraine — to take away its sovereignty, to take away its independence. That has failed.”
Austin explained that the U.S.’s aims in supporting Ukraine are to ensure that the country remains a sovereign country and to unite the international community in opposing Russian aggression.
“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,” he said. “So it has already lost a lot of military capability, and a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”
Russian forces have sustained heavy losses. The Ukrainian government claimed today that over 21,000 Russian soldiers have died during the invasion.
The two officials announced a slew of measures intended to support the Ukrainian war effort after their meeting with Zelensky, including $713 million more in defense aid and an expansion of efforts to train Ukrainian troops to use weapons systems donated by NATO countries.
Austin is meeting with the top defense officials from dozens of countries to discuss the international effort to support Ukraine’s military tomorrow in Germany.
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this post misstated the amount of defense aid being offered.