Secretary Antony J. Blinken and Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal Before Their Meeting

PRIME MINISTER SHMYHAL: Dear Mr. Secretary Blinken, dear colleagues, first of all, I would like to thank to Biden-Harris administration, U.S. Congress, all U.S. people for such a strong support of my country during these dark times of our history, during this full-scale aggression. Thank you so much for all kind of support, especially military support, functional support, financial support, and humanitarian support, and all other - even the mental support of our refugees. All of us thank you so much for this.

So the main challenges which we have now, it's - once again, it's the situation in the air defense spheres, so we discussed this very deeply. We are grateful for additional complexes, Patriot complexes, additional air defense missiles. Thank you for perspectives of our cooperation in this sphere of air defense. Thank you for support us in energy sphere. We are waiting for a difficult, tough wintertime. We are sure - and we have this information - the Russians will continue their terroristic attacks on our civilian infrastructure, our energy infrastructure. We need to protect this, and we have the support from U.S. in a sense of additional equipment, generators, transformers, and all other needed equipment. Thank you so much for financial support of energy sphere. We cooperate with U.S. embassy, with your ambassador. Thank you so much. All the list of priorities are approved, and we move forward with this issue and it's very important for me as prime minister.

Thank you so much also for financial support. We had a first tranche - even $4 billion from U.S. to our budget and financing of our budget deficit. We also implement reforms and reform of our obligations. We will implement custom reform (inaudible) time. We will implement (inaudible) reform (inaudible) time, as we have agreed. And we hope that we will continue our financial cooperation. We had a good news from IMF today; we have statement of IMF. They finished fifth review and program of IMF is continuing in Ukraine. This is very good, like a pillar, financial pillar for our financial support from all G7 partners.

So on military, on financial, on energy sphere, thank you so much for your personal efforts. Thank you so much for support. Thank you so much to your country, to your people for this unwavering support of Ukraine during this hard time. Thank you.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Prime Minister, thank you very much as always. Very good to be able to spend time with you. I appreciate very much the discussion that we had. And simply put, I think you've seen again the determination on the part of the United States but also I was here, as you know, with Foreign Secretary Lammy from the United Kingdom - a shared determination along with many other countries to continue to strongly support Ukraine and really in two ways - one, to make sure that you have what you need to get through the immediate challenges being posed by the ongoing and even intensifying Russian aggression, but also to make sure that Ukraine is able to stand strongly on its own feet for a long time militarily, economically, democratically.

And I think the work that we're doing together in all the areas that you've just described will help accomplish both goals - dealing with the immediate threat, but also making sure that Ukraine emerges as a strong, independent country, increasingly integrated with the institutions of the Euro-Atlantic community, including the European Union and NATO. So I think the program we have together, that we're working together, is one for the immediate needs but also for Ukraine's future - the future that the Ukrainian people so clearly want. And as always, it's a pleasure working with you on this, and I'm also glad our teams are working so closely together.

So thank you for the good conversation this evening.