Ukrainians have voiced their shock and dismay at the US pausing its military aid to the country – what one politician called a “dangerous” situation.
“We’ll see very soon the serious consequences – dangerous consequences,” Oleksandr Merezhko, who chairs the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told BBC Breakfast on Tuesday.
Merezhko said the pause could start having an impact on the ground as soon as “in the coming days”.
Ukraine woke up to the news on Tuesday that the US was “pausing and reviewing” its military aid. A White House official told the BBC’s US news partner CBS that its reason for doing so was to “ensure that it is contributing to a solution”.
“The President has been clear that he is focused on peace. We need our partners to be committed to that goal as well,” the White House official added.
While US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have yet to comment, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said his country is still willing to cooperate with the US, and reiterated Kyiv’s “gratefulness” to Washington for their support to date.
Some Ukrainian MPs however, have come out to call the decision “disastrous”.
“When we are in desperate need of American weaponry, of American support… [it] looks like siding with Russia” to end it now, Merezhko said.
“I’m appealing to Mr Trump not to play with these dangerous issues because we’re talking about lives.”
Merezhko said the decision also shines “a new light” on the Oval Office spat on Friday between Zelensky and the US president and vice-president, which Merezhko called “an attempt to find justification” to stop the military aid.
“It was a show, you know, deliberately played,” he added.
US Vice-President JD Vance said he saw “big problems” with accusations that Trump is on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s side, when asked during an interview on Fox News Channel’s Hannity on Monday.
Vance said people had to accept that Trump is “not just assuming that everything the Russians tell him is true”.
“He’s negotiating with them. There’s a give-and-take. There’s a trust, but [we] verify. That’s called diplomacy. We used to have some respect for that in Washington.”
For Kyiv, the pause amounts to the blocking of a major lifeline. The last time this happened – because of political disagreements in the US Congress – Zelensky said Ukraine directly lost lives and land as a result.
Questions remain unanswered over whether Ukraine will still receive ammunition for American weapons already delivered, or whether Washington will continue to share intelligence with Kyiv.
Close to Ukraine’s western border with Poland, there were frequent, police-escorted convoys of military aid which crawled their way to the frontlines, bringing armour and ammunition for exhausted troops.
One serving 25-year-old female Ukrainian soldier, who the BBC is not naming because she did not have permission to speak, said she did not think Ukraine’s military could hold out for “very long – maybe six months”.
“But judging by how our units and our army have endured extreme pressure without assistance before, I still don’t know the full capacity of our forces,” she continued.
“The real cost of the US cutting off aid will be measured in lives, in more orphans, in more suffering,” she said, adding that Europe could replace US support if they “step out of their comfort zones”.
One Ukrainian advocacy group said Trump was “hanging Ukrainians out to dry and giving Russia the green light to keep marching west.”
Ukrainian MP Volodymyr Aryev called the pause a “very painful blow”. MP Oleksiy Honcharenko said it was a “catastrophe” they saw coming, but argued that “not all is lost”.
“Roosevelt and Churchill are turning in their graves. America has sided with the global evil,” Ukrainian blogger and activist Yuri Kasyanov said.
Another blogger, Leonid Shvets, responded sarcastically: “Thank you America! You have gone mad.”
Reactions from Ukraine’s European allies have also started coming in.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is yet to directly respond to the pause, but Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme it was “a matter for the US… we are focused on supporting Ukraine, bringing the US around the table”.
She said Sir Keir would not “conduct dialogue on open airwaves”, adding that the UK government had ramped up its support for Ukraine in recent days and is committed to peace, like she believes the US is.
France’s Europe minister, Benjamin Haddad, was more forward on the issue.
Speaking on French TV, he said the pause made peace a more remote idea, “because it would only strengthen the hand of the aggressor on the ground – Russia.”
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk confirmed that US weapons supplies via Rzeszow-Jasionka, a key airport near the Ukrainian border, had halted.
Earlier, he posted on X that a “sovereign, pro-Western” Ukraine made his country “stronger and safer”, adding: “Whoever questions this obvious truth contributes to Putin’s triumph.”
Additional reporting by Vitaliy Shevchenko and Paul Kirby
