Liz Truss, UK foreign secretary, told reporters after the meeting that member states had backed giving more weapons…reports Asian Lite News
Nato member states have agreed to supply new types of advanced weaponry to Ukraine, alliance representatives said, as Kyiv prepares for an offensive by Russia in the country’s east.
The pledge came after a plea from Ukraine’s foreign minister for western countries to move faster with supplies or risk seeing “many people die . . . because this help came too late”.
Six weeks since Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow’s troops have largely withdrawn from territory north of Kyiv after failing to seize the capital but are regrouping and rearming ahead of an attempt to advance in the eastern Donbas region, Ukrainian and western officials said.
That has sparked demands from Kyiv for western countries to supply more heavy weapons, armour and more advanced systems. Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said he would use a Nato meeting in Brussels to ask for aircraft, missiles, armoured vehicles and heavy air defence systems, among others.
Liz Truss, UK foreign secretary, told reporters after the meeting that member states had backed giving more weapons.
“There was support for countries to supply new and heavier equipment to Ukraine, so that they can respond to these new threats from Russia,” she said. “And we agreed to help Ukrainian forces move from their Soviet-era equipment to Nato standard equipment, on a bilateral basis.”
Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, said Washington was looking at sending “new systems” to Ukraine.
“We are not going to let anything stand in the way of getting Ukrainians what they need,” he said. “We are looking across the board right now, not only at what we have provided . . . [but] whether there are additional systems that would make a difference.”
The promise of more military aid came as Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, admitted Russia had suffered “significant losses of troops” during its invasion of Ukraine, which he described as “a huge tragedy for us”.
Peskov said Russia had withdrawn from Kyiv and Chernihiv in central Ukraine last week as a “goodwill act to lift tension from those regions and show Russia is really ready to create comfortable conditions to continue negotiations”. But fighting would continue in the Donbas, he added.
Following the killing of hundreds of civilians in Bucha and other Kyiv suburbs, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, warned that elsewhere in the country Russia would seek to portray people killed by its forces as victims of Ukrainian troops.
“To do this, the occupiers collect corpses on the streets, take them out and can use them elsewhere in accordance with the elaborated propaganda scenarios,” he said in a video address late on Thursday, reported Financial Times.
Nato member countries have supplied Ukraine with anti-tank missiles, drones and other defensive weaponry before and during the war. However, they have declined to supply other classes of weapons or impose a no-fly zone, as Kyiv has demanded, over the risk of engaging Russia in a wider war.