Cnn
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The US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, should not attend the meeting next week of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, marking the first time since the group’s foundation three years ago that a senior Pentagon official will not be there to represent the United States, said familiar officials with the CNN.
The United States has retired for months from the group, which was founded by former defense secretary Lloyd Austin in 2022 after the invasion of Russia as a means for dozens of countries to rationalize the delivery of military equipment to Ukraine to suppress Russian military advances.
While Austin or a senior Pentagon official have always chaired the group’s monthly meetings, HegSeth has sold this role to the United Kingdom in recent months – even as an American general, told legislators on Thursday that “continuing to help Ukraine in the daily Battlefield” is “very important” when it comes to keeping the lever on the Russians.
Hegseth attended a UDCG meeting in February at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he told the Allies that the United States would no longer be a guarantor of European security and that it was very “unlikely” that Ukraine would never join NATO – a commentary which, at the time, marked a dramatic change in the long -term American position that Ukraine would come together.
Defense News was the first to point out that Hegseth is likely to skip the meeting next week.
The Trump administration has activated and disabled its military and intelligence support in Ukraine in recent months to push Kyiv to the negotiating table. The United States has not imposed any penalty on Russia, even though Moscow refused to accept a proposal from the White House for a 30-day ceasefire and continues to place conditions even on a partial cease-fire in the Black Sea.
Russia did not do on the list of countries where the Trump administration announced that it imposed prices this week.
Trump publicly attacked Russian President Vladimir Putin last weekend and threatened prices on countries that buy Russian oil, but a few days later, temporarily suspended sanctions against a Russian financier and Putin Allied in order to welcome him for meetings this week in Washington, DC, the first time that Russian official has been going to DC for such discussions since Ukraine invaded in 2022.
While the Russian negotiator, Kirill Dimitriev, was in DC for meetings Thursday, General Christopher Cavoli, the head of the United States European commander and the supreme commander of the Europe allies testified in the congress that Russia poses a “chronic” and “growing” threat to the United States and the West by saying that Russia “actively puts a campaign of destabilization through Europe and beyond”.
“Russia’s war in Ukraine, now in its fourth year, has revealed that Russia was a chronic threat, and we see in the future it will be a growing threat, which is ready to use military force to achieve its geopolitical objectives,” Cavoli told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.
“The additional access to this threat to Russia is the improvement of partnerships between our opponents-Iran, the Communist Chinese Party, RPDC and Russia itself. And they are increasingly representing a global risk,” he said.
Dimitriev’s envoy and Trump, Steve Witkoff, met on Wednesday, sources told CNN.
US and Western intelligence officials do not believe that Russia want to negotiate a cease-fire agreement with Ukraine in good faith, CNN reported. Moscow always believes that she can maintain her war effort and overcome Ukraine on the battlefield.
A senior NATO official reiterated this Thursday, saying that “Russia still thinks that time is mainly on its side”.
“We have questions for a long time to find out if Putin intends to negotiate in good faith,” said the official. Russia is “ready to continue these talks (about the repair of links with the United States) at the same time as it is late and by blocking and saying that they cannot accept American proposals at the moment, on the real ceasefire. community.”