Russian leader talks with US President on natural gas pipeline

Ukraine's leader travels to the United States in hopes of bolstering security ties with Washington and persuading the administration to ramp up sanctions against a new Russian natural gas pipeline that bypasses his country.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called Washington's failure to block the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany a grave political error. Although, the meeting was originally scheduled for August 30 but was postponed by at least 2 days due to ongoing evacuation efforts in Kabul as the US nears the August 31 deadline for the complete withdrawal of the troops. 

It was discussed extensively in the meeting about close cooperation between the two countries on energy security. It targeted President Zelenskyy’s efforts to tackle corruption and implement a reform agenda based on shared democratic values.

Zelenskyy has described the new pipeline as a powerful geopolitical weapon for Russia, which annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014 after the ouster of the former Kremlin-friendly president and has thrown its weight behind a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine.

Washington has strongly opposed the construction of Nord Stream 2, but the Biden administration has opted not to punish the German company overseeing the project while announcing new sanctions against Russian companies and ships.

It was said in a political statement that Russians have continued to underline Nord Stream 2  as a matter of some kind of compensation program. Moreover, it is a security threat for Ukraine, because if there is no physical transit of gas through Ukraine, it increases the chance of a full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine and it’s not in the interests of Ukraine, and it’s not in the interests of Europe, not in the interest of the U.S.