KYIV, Oct 21 - Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin arrived in Kyiv early Monday morning, as the future of US aid to Ukraine hangs in the balance of the imminent US presidential election and as Russia continues to make small but steady gains on the battlefield.

Austin met with President Volodymyr Zelensky and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov while in Kyiv to discuss Ukraine’s weapons needs and how the US can continue to support the country’s military over the next year, CNN reported.

After their meeting, Zelensky wrote on X that he discussed expanding the use of long-range strike capabilities against Russian military targets.

A US defense official said that during their meeting, Austin emphasized to Zelensky the importance of Ukraine defending the territory it has taken inside Russia’s Kursk region and capitalizing on those gains, as well as fending off the Russians in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk. They also discussed how Ukraine can shore up its manpower, as the military has struggled lately with force regeneration and recruitment.

Much of Austin’s later meeting with Umerov and Ukrainian Armed Forces commander Oleksandr Syrskyi was also focused on Kursk, the defense official said, and the officials drilled down on military planning there for the next several months.

The secretary’s visit was also meant to serve as a moment for him to “step back” and look at the “arc” of the US-Ukraine relationship over the last two and a half years of war, a senior defense official said.

It was not a victory lap, however. The Ukrainians are in a “very tough” situation against the Russians heading into winter, the official noted.

That is despite the heavy Western sanctions imposed on Russia’s economy in response to its invasion, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment the US has surged to Ukraine, and the multinational coalitions that the Biden administration rallied from the earliest days of the war to help Ukrainian troops beat back Russian advances.

Loud explosions were heard in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in the early hours of Monday local time, according to a CNN producer on the ground, in a stark illustration of the daily bombardments the country still faces more than 2.5 years into Moscow’s grinding war. City authorities said air defenses have been activated.

Austin, and the Biden administration more broadly, sees multinational coalitions as a key aspect of his legacy as defense secretary, particularly the Ukraine Defense Contact Group — an alliance of 57 countries and the European Union that Austin first convened two months into the war to coordinate immediate military aid to Ukraine.

“It’s been absolutely remarkable that Ukraine has been able to do what it’s done,” Austin told reporters traveling with him on Sunday night. “It’s been able to do that, of course, because of the fact that we have supported them from the very beginning, and we’ve rallied some 50 countries to be a part of that support.”

In his speech at the Kyiv Diplomatic Academy on Monday, Austin rebuffed critics who say the US should not be spending so much money on Ukraine.

“For anyone who thinks that American leadership is expensive — well, consider the price of American retreat,” he said. “In the face of aggression, the price of principle is always dwarfed by the cost of capitulation. Our allies and partners know that. And I’ve been proud to watch the pro-Ukraine coalition dig deep.” (cnn/ez)