Ramstein meeting on Ukraine postponed after Biden cancels trip

By Miranda Murray and Sabine Siebold

BERLIN (Reuters) -A summit meeting of Ukraine’s key allies in Ramstein, Germany has been postponed from Saturday after U.S. President Joe Biden cancelled his visit, the organisers said on Wednesday.

The White House said Biden needed to oversee preparations for Hurricane Milton and relief efforts after a hurricane last month killed more than 200 people.

The Ramstein group of Ukraine’s arms donors had been set to convene for its highest level meeting ever on the sidelines of Biden’s Oct. 10-13 state visit to Germany, which would have been the first U.S. state visit in nearly 40 years.

“The Oct. 12, 2024 event is postponed,” the U.S. public affairs office at Ramstein Air Base said in an email to journalists. “Announcements about future Ukraine Defence Contact Group meetings will be forthcoming.”

The meeting aimed to underscore unwavering support for Kyiv against Russia’s invasion at a time when Ukrainian armed forces are under huge pressure.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday that Kyiv would present its “victory plan” to its allies in what would have been a test of Kyiv’s vision on ending the war with Russia.

There was no immediate comment from Kyiv on the postponement of the summit, which one analyst said did not mean Ukraine would slip down the agenda.

“It was clear that Biden had to send the signal that he was taking care of domestic policy – so close to the (U.S.) elections,” said Stefan Mair, director of German foreign policy think tank SWP said. “I don’t see this (postponement) as downgrading the importance of Ukraine.”

A German defence ministry spokesperson said defence ministers aimed to meet within the Ramstein format this month but no decision had been made yet on when.

“It is true that the national security advisors are in close contact with each other and are also coordinating closely on the issue of Ukraine… there should be a face-to-face meeting (of leaders) soon and an exchange of views,” German government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit told a briefing.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Washington gathered like-minded nations at the U.S. air base in Ramstein, southwestern Germany, establishing a group of some 50 countries whose defence ministers meet regularly to match Kyiv’s arms requests with pledges of donors.

Saturday’s meeting – the first at the level of government leaders – had been scheduled to open with public remarks by Biden, Zelenskiy and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, according to a German official.

(Reporting by Barbara Erling in Warsaw, Andreas Rinke, Kirsti Knolle, Sabine Siebold in Berlin, Tom Balmforth in Kyiv, writing by Alan Charlish; editing by Mark Heinrich and Philippa Fletcher)