After Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III’s meeting with officials in Sweden on Wednesday, he will move on to lead an international meeting in Germany on Friday to coordinate aid for Ukraine, as Kyiv presses for more weapons to fight Russia’s invading forces ahead of an offensive that Ukrainian and Western officials say is in the offing.
President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed frustration on Sunday over the delays in getting more arms to Ukraine’s forces, which have been in pitched battle against its outsize opponent for more than a year. The eastern city of Bakhmut, where fighting has raged for 10 months, has been a particularly bloody battleground for both sides.
“Every time we hear that the promised supply of weapons is delayed, every time there are doubts about the type of weapons for Ukraine, about the range or other quality characteristics — every time it means that Ukrainian soldiers are giving their lives,” Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address to the nation on Monday.
Mr. Austin met on Monday with the British defense secretary, Ben Wallace, in Washington. Mr. Wallace projected optimism about Ukraine’s battlefield “momentum,” but cautioned that the war was likely to endure into next year.
Mr. Austin met with his Swedish counterpart, Pal Jonson, on Wednesday and expressed his hope that the country would be able to join NATO by midsummer.
Sweden neighbors Finland, which shares a long border with Russia, and the two banded together to submit bids for full NATO membership last year, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sweden, however, was left on the sidelines last month, when the Turkish Parliament gave the alliance’s last necessary approval to Finland, but withheld it from Sweden, because the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has accused Sweden of harboring Kurdish figures he considers terrorists.
On Friday, Mr. Austin will lead talks at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany with officials from more than 40 nations, a collective known as the Ukraine Contact Group. The group has met regularly at the base for the past year to discuss and coordinate military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine.
Those talks will likely focus on sending more arms to Ukraine, which has said for months that troops are starved for ammunition and using artillery shells faster than its allies can produce and supply. The claims were corroborated by the leaked American intelligence documents that began circulating widely this month.
Mr. Austin spoke with Oleksii Reznikov, the Ukrainian defense minister, on Monday to “discuss priorities” ahead of the meeting in Ramstein, according to a statement from the U.S. Defense Department.
