Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visiting Scranton Army Artillery factory
The city of Scranton depends on the arms industry to survive. Now the scenario may be moving to this small US industrial zone.
Name Scranton You can tell more to the Portuguese for being the scene of the famous The Office series, but it is also the homeland of the previous US President Joe Biden.
It has 75 thousand inhabitants and is in the north of the state of Pennsylvania, in the US, a distant 7,560 km from Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. But it is being affected by Donald Trump’s decision to suspend military aid sent to Ukraine.
Biden was a great supporter of the sending of military aid to Ukraine, and it was in the city where the US government was born Scranton Army Artillery Factorywhich since the invasion of Ukraine has increased artillery production to send it to the battlefield.
The Scranton Artillery Factory, along with another large ammunition factory in the region, “ensures that combatants have ammunition when and where necessary and continues to reinforce US stocks worldwide,” said Lieutenant General Chris Mohan, quoted by.
According to, the city was, before the war, essentially a coal extraction center and small American factories, but now depends on defense facilities of the zone to obtain good and well -paid jobs.
In fact, the company has a impact of $ 2.4 billion (2.22 billion euros) in the area and is the largest industrial employer in the region. In September 2024, the army was producing 36 thousand projectiles per month, compared to 24 thousand six months earlier.
“Scranton has a very proud story of support for Ukraine,” said Mayor Paige Cognetti, “and It has been a very difficult couple of weeks here, As we see this support to decrease from US administration. ”
“We have several Ukrainian churches here. We have a great diaspora from American Ukrainians, ”he said.
“Seeing US policy change, and the US potentially turning their backs on Ukraine is really terrifying,” he says, and both an international point of view and for the city itself: this place “is a very important employment. The jobs are really high quality. They are well paid jobs, that support the family. ”
With the announced by US President Donald Trump, the inhabitants of Scranton, and the hundreds of workers From this factory, which has even been visited by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, they fear for their future – and for the Ukrainian people.
A city inhabitant, Brandon Lux, says that “if the government suspends all funding to Ukraine at this time, it will definitely have implications for what happens here in our city.”
