“Escalation”, threat of a “third world war”: Donald Trump’s bodyguard strongly criticized, this Monday, November 18, Joe Biden’s decision to authorize Ukraine to strike on Russian territory with long-range missiles American made.
Democratic President Joe Biden has indeed granted a long-standing request from kyiv, a bold turnaround in the final weeks of his mandate.
This decision, which the Biden administration has been careful not to confirm publicly, and the outgoing president’s promise to accelerate military aid to Ukraine, comes in the midst of a transition of power in the United States and as Donald Trump and its allies criticize American aid to kyiv.
It comes especially as the word negotiation is increasingly being whispered to try to end the conflict, caused by the Russian invasion in February 2022.
kyiv fears being forced into negotiations unfavorable to Ukraine, against a backdrop of progress by Moscow on the ground.
Echoing the Kremlin, which promised an “appropriate” response in the event of these ATACMS missiles being fired against Russia, Donald Trump’s entourage accused Joe Biden of risking an escalation “for political purposes”.
During his daily briefing, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller indicated that Russia was solely responsible for a “major escalation” by having accepted the deployment on its soil of thousands of North Korean troops, and that There was “only one president at a time”.
But for Republicans close to Donald Trump, it is putting a spoke in the wheels of the next administration.
“New War”
“This is a new stage in the escalation and no one knows where it will lead us,” Florida MP Mike Waltz, Donald Trump’s next National Security Advisor, said on Fox. a key position.
“No one anticipated that Joe Biden would be responsible for the escalation of the war in Ukraine during the transition period. It’s as if he was starting a whole new war,” Richard Grenell, former director of Acting National Intelligence Officer during Trump’s first term (2017-2021).
“Everything has changed now […] And all this for politics,” he accused.
Mr. Grenell has not yet been assigned a position but his name had been circulating to head American diplomacy, before Donald Trump set his sights on Senator Marco Rubio.
Not to be outdone, the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., said, also on the possibility of establishing peace and saving lives.
Donald Trump did not react publicly but his campaign team indicated that he was “the only one capable of getting the two parties to negotiate peace and work to end the war and the killings”, according to his spokesperson Steven Cheung.
Speed racing
On the thousandth day of the war on Tuesday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga will visit the US Congress in Washington on Tuesday to provide support.
Because the intentions of the future Trump administration are anything but clear.
The former president, who will return to the White House on January 20, promised to end the war in “24 hours” and questioned the tens of billions of dollars spent by Washington on Ukraine – more than $60 billion in military aid since the Russian invasion.
“How do we bring both sides to the negotiating table to end this war? What is the framework of an agreement and who sits at that table? These are the questions that President Trump and I will address work,” said Mike Waltz.
Just after his election on November 5 against Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump spoke with President Zelensky, which was part of a “constructive interaction”.
In the meantime, President Biden is seeking to outdo the future president and lay down markers that the next administration will have difficulty undoing, with the aim of strengthening kyiv’s position in the event of negotiations.
