Ukraine leader to urge Biden to ramp up Russian sanctions

Ukraine’s leader is travelling to the United States this week 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, and he is expected to again raise the issue during his talks Wednesday with U.S. President Joe Biden.

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.
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