The United States has stopped certain deliveries from arms to Ukraine, the White House announced on Tuesday, as the Russian war in the country intensifies.
The decision was “putting the interests of the United States first,” said White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly, citing a review of the US military support and military assistance department to other countries. “
Although the United States has provided tens of billions of dollars in aid to kyiv from the large -scale invasion of Russia in February 2022, concerns have grown within the Trump administration about the decrease in US military reserves.
Kelly did not specify what shipments they would be delayed, and Ukrainian officials have not yet responded publicly. However, Reuters reported that air defense missiles and precision ammunition are among the affected weapons.
Elbridge Colby, Undersecretary of Defense of the United States policy, said the Department of Defense “continues to provide the President of solid options to continue military aid to Ukraine.”
At the same time, Colby added: “The department is examining and rigorously adapting its approach to achieve this objective while preserving the preparation of US forces for administration's defense priorities.”
An American official told CBS News, the American media partner of the BBC, that the measure comes from the concern about the risk that US reserves run out too much.
“The force of the United States armed forces is still unquestionable, just ask Iran,” Kelly said, referring to recent US strikes in three Iranian nuclear sites.
The announcement occurs days after the president of the United States, Donald Trump, met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during the NATO summit in the Netherlands.
When the BBC asked him about sending more patriot missile systems to Ukraine, Trump replied: “We are going to see if we can make some of them available.”
Reflecting on his conversations with Zelensky, Trump said: “Sometimes we had a bit difficult, but I couldn't have been friendlier.”
The two leaders had a tense meeting in the Oval office in March, after which Trump temporarily arrested military aid to Ukraine that had been previously approved by the Biden administration. The exchange of intelligence with Kyiv was also briefly suspended, although both actions were reversed later.
At the end of April, the United States and Ukraine signed an agreement that gave access to the United States to Ukrainian mineral reserves in exchange for continuous military assistance.
Meanwhile, diplomatic efforts continue. On Tuesday, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time in more than two and a half years. According to Macron's office, the two leaders spoke for more than two hours, and the French president urged a high fire in Ukraine.
Putin responded by blaming the West, with the Kremlin saying that the Russian leader told Macron that the Western nations had “ignored the security interests of Russia” and “created a head of the Antirusa bridge in Ukraine in Ukraine.”
The decision of the United States occurs in the middle of a strong escalation in hostilities. During the weekend, Russia launched one of the largest aerial assaults since the war began, deploying more than 500 weapons, including drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, against the Ukrainian objectives.
On Tuesday, three people died in a Ukrainian unmanned aircraft strike in a Russian factory in Izhevsk, a city more than 1,000 km (620 miles) of the Ukrainian border.
Russia currently controls about 20% of the territory of Ukraine, including the Crimean Peninsula, which it attached in 2014.
(BBC)
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