US Defense Minister Lloyd Austin made his first public appearance on Tuesday since his hospitalization in early January without notifying the highest authorities, speaking via videoconference during a meeting of the contact group on Ukraine.
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Lloyd Austin, 70, was hospitalized on January 1 for two weeks due to complications following an operation related to prostate cancer which he was diagnosed with in early December.
This diagnosis and the two hospitalizations that followed were only communicated to the country’s senior authorities, starting with Joe Biden, several days later, which caused an outcry in the press and among his Republican adversaries, in the midst of election year.
“The security of the entire international community is at stake in Ukraine’s fight. I am more determined than ever to work with our allies and partners to support Ukraine and get the job done,” Austin said in front of a Defense Department seal and small American and Ukrainian flags. .
He highlighted the $250 million in military aid to Ukraine announced by Washington last month, but did not detail new US aid as funds had dried up.
The Republican opposition in Congress is refusing to authorize a new budget package until President Joe Biden responds to their demands to reduce immigration at the border with Mexico.
The meeting of the contact group, which coordinates coalition military aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia, comes as at least seven civilians have been killed and nearly 80 injured in airstrikes Russian nocturnal attacks targeting in particular the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and Kharkiv (east), according to local authorities on Tuesday.
The hospitalization of the head of the Pentagon without informing the White House had left a key official of the national security of the United States without news, at a time when American forces are the target of fire in Iraq and Syria and that the Yemen’s Houthi rebels are attacking international maritime traffic in the Red Sea.
The White House, however, assured that the head of the Pentagon had supervised the American-British strikes on the Houthi rebels in Yemen on January 12 “from his hospital bed”.
