
Supporters of Ukraine wave US and Ukrainian flags outside the US Capitol as the House of Representatives passed the Ukraine aid bill on 20 April 2024. Photo: EPA-EFE/JIM LO SCALZO
Newly confirmed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued a 90-day moratorium on the release of foreign aid grants that appears to pause Washington’s military assistance to Ukraine, POLITICO reported on Friday.
While the document cited by POLITICO, which requires all US diplomatic and consular posts to suspend all “existing foreign assistance awards”, does not specify if it affects military aid to Kyiv, Ukraine has not been named as an exception to the sweeping ban, unlike Israel and Egypt.
An unnamed State Department official confirmed to POLITICO that the pause appeared to end aid to key allies including Ukraine, while another said the US “just totally went nuclear” on foreign assistance.
Officers responsible for projects in Ukraine have been told to stop work, an anonymous United States Agency for International Development (USAID) official told Reuters on Friday.
Reuters also cited Jeremy Konyndyk, a former USAID official who is now president of NGO Refugees International, saying that the order would “kill people” if it is implemented as written, and described the moratorium as “a wrecking ball”.
However, Voice of America correspondent Ostap Yarysh said on Saturday that the moratorium applied to the Foreign Military Financing programme, which had already spent the $1.6 billion in funds allocated to it by Congress anyway.
The other existing programmes used for the transfer of military aid to Ukraine — the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) and the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) — did not appear to have been affected by the order, Yarysh added.
However, Yarysh noted that the suspension did target important non-military USAID programmes, including support for Ukraine’s energy sector, health care system, schools and infrastructure reconstruction efforts.
Donald Trump, who took the oath of office on Monday to become the 47th president of the United States, made bringing the war in Ukraine to an end as quickly as possible one of his central campaign pledges, sparking fears that the US could push Kyiv into making significant concessions to reach a peace deal acceptable to the Kremlin.