(Kyiv) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced Monday that he would travel to Washington “this week” to meet his American counterpart, Donald Trump, as well as other officials from the energy and defense sector.
“I will meet President Trump in Washington this week,” he declared during a press conference in Kyiv alongside the head of European diplomacy Kaja Kallas.
“We need to discuss a sequence of measures that I want to propose to the president,” he added, without further details.
Mr Zelensky said he hoped to meet Donald Trump on Friday and would also have “other meetings” with US officials.
He notably mentioned meetings in the United States with representatives of “military companies” and elected representatives of Congress.
“The main topic will be air defense, but I will also have meetings with companies in the energy sector,” he continued.
In recent days, Ukraine has been targeted by new waves of Russian bombings on its energy infrastructure, which threaten to deprive many Ukrainians of light and heat as winter approaches.
A delegation of senior Ukrainian officials including the Prime Minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, the head of the presidential administration, Andriï Iermak, and the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Roustem Umerov, are already on their way to the United States, Mr. Zelensky said Monday evening on the X platform.
“I am grateful to President Trump for our dialogue and his support,” he added in this message on his X account.
This weekend, the Ukrainian leader spoke twice in two days with Donald Trump by telephone.
On Monday, during his press conference with Kaja Kallas, Mr. Zelensky said he had discussed “in detail” during these calls with Mr. Trump “Ukraine’s long-range (strike) capabilities.”
Mr. Trump assured Sunday that he could threaten Vladimir Putin to deliver American long-range Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv, if Russia did not agree to end the war triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
