Eduardo González
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will make his third visit to Spain this Tuesday, November 18, where he will be received by the King and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
“This meeting in Madrid will be an opportunity to reaffirm Spain’s commitment to Ukraine in all areas,” Moncloa Palace stated in a press release. Zelensky will be received by the King at the Zarzuela Palace at 1:30 p.m., and the Monarch will later host a luncheon in President Zelensky’s honor.
At 5:00 p.m., the Ukrainian president will be received by Pedro Sánchez at the Moncloa Palace to discuss issues of common interest, and after the meeting, both leaders will hold a joint press conference.
“We have been preparing for this for a long time, and now we can say that the visit to Spain will be productive. Another strong country has joined our partners in initiatives that truly help us,” Zelensky wrote on social media this Sunday. Spain is “another powerful country that will join our allies in the initiatives we really need,” continued the Ukrainian president, who specified that “the most important priorities are air defense systems and missiles.”
The meeting comes almost a month after Pedro Sánchez announced Spain’s inclusion in the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), a NATO mechanism to assist Ukraine through the joint procurement of weaponry from the United States, as he had personally informed President Zelensky. In a press conference, Pedro Sánchez explained that the reason Spain is joining PURL is because, “today, major air defense components are manufactured in the United States.” “Hopefully, in the future, strategic autonomy” will allow them to be produced in Europe, he added.
In this context, it is very likely that Sánchez will commit this Tuesday in Madrid to Zelensky to finance the purchase of US weaponry for Kyiv and to finalize the amount of this bill.
In fact, the President of Ukraine arrives in Madrid after meeting this Monday in Paris with the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, with whom he signed a cooperation agreement for the acquisition of French defense equipment by Ukraine, specifically one hundred Rafale F4 fighter jets by 2035 for the Ukrainian air force, SAMP/T air defense systems, radars for air defense systems, air-to-air missiles, and aerial bombs.
Pending finalization of the agenda, it is expected that Zelensky will visit the Congress in Madrid (where he would be received by the Speaker of the Lower House, Francina Armengol, and the President of the Senate, Pedro Rollán) and the Prado Museum to view Picasso’s Guernica. In early April 2022, barely a month and a half after the Russian invasion, Zelensky stated during a videoconference before the full Congress: “It’s April 2022, but it feels like April 1937, when the whole world learned about the bombing of Guernica.”
This is the second official visit and the third visit overall by the President of Ukraine to Spain. The first took place in October 2023, when he participated in the European Political Community Summit in Granada, and the second official visit occurred in May 2024, when Zelensky and Sánchez signed the Security Cooperation Agreement between Spain and Ukraine in Madrid, under which Spain committed to sending Kyiv a military aid package valued at €1.129 billion.
On that occasion, Zelensky also attended a luncheon hosted by King Felipe and Queen Letizia in his honor and visited the Congress of Deputies. He also took the opportunity of his meeting with King Felipe to invite the King and Queen to visit Ukraine “when they can.”
