UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham said he and other European leaders plan to travel to the US next month to lobby President Donald Trump to let Ukraine access some of its Patriot air defence missile stocks ahead of the winter.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m looking forward to going to New York in September,\u201d Burnham said in an interview with Bloomberg in Kyiv on Monday evening, referring to the coming UN General Assembly meeting in New York. It would be his first trip to the US since becoming prime minister.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve not fully confirmed the details yet but it\u2019s likely I will go, particularly after today\u2019s discussion,\u201d he said. \u201cLeaving today, I\u2019m quite clear what I need to do in the next few weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Burnham\u2019s comments came on his first international visit since becoming premier, after chairing a meeting of Ukraine\u2019s allies for the first time and holding a bilateral meeting with Ukraine\u2019s President, Volodymyr Zelensky.<\/p>\n
Zelensky has made repeated pleas to European nations and the US to help Ukraine obtain Patriot missile interceptors and to replenish its stocks in time for winter, when Russia is expected to ramp up attacks on energy infrastructure again. The interceptors are the most potent weapons to shoot down Russian cruise and ballistic missiles.<\/p>\n
Burnham said he left feeling \u201creally optimistic\u201d that Ukraine\u2019s current struggles defending against Russian ballistic missile strikes due to its low stockpile of interceptors are \u201cfixable\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham said he and other European leaders plan to travel to the US next…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200766,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[73961],"tags":[28914,2085,62144,12,307,34,907,1419,89771,329,89264,330,53553,89770,935],"class_list":["post-200765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-andy-burnham","tag-andy-burnham","tag-bloomberg","tag-coalition-of-the-willing","tag-donald-trump","tag-europe","tag-iran","tag-kyiv","tag-new-york","tag-patriot-air-defence-missile","tag-russia","tag-scalp","tag-ukraine","tag-un-general-assembly","tag-united-nations-human-rights-monitoring-mission-in-ukraine","tag-volodymyr-zelensky"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117153233858279318","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}