MADRID: Spain will give Ukraine a fresh military aid package worth 615 million euros ($710 million) to help it fight Russia’s invasion, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Tuesday.
Speaking at a Madrid press conference alongside visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Sanchez said around 300 million euros will go toward “new defense equipment.”
“Your fight is ours,” Sanchez said, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “neo-imperialism” aims to “weaken the European project and everything it stands for.”
The announcement came after the leaders signed several bilateral agreements, including measures to combat Russian disinformation.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, tens of thousands of people — both civilians and soldiers — have died, and millions have been displaced, leaving large swathes of the country devastated.
Earlier on Tuesday, Sanchez and Zelensky visited Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum to view Pablo Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece “Guernica.”
In April 2022, just weeks after Russia’s invasion, Zelensky compared it to the 1937 bombing of Guernica, a small Basque town attacked by Nazi warplanes in support of Franco’s troops during the Spanish Civil War.
Zelensky, who visited Paris on Monday, is scheduled to travel to Turkiye on Wednesday for renewed peace talks involving Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and US envoy Steve Witkoff.