Photo: EPA-EFE/WILL OLIVER
US President Joe Biden stood firm on the restrictions his administration has placed on the Ukrainian army’s use of American weapons to strike military targets inside Russia on Thursday, telling reporters that lifting them “wouldn’t make sense”.
Speaking at a press conference following this week’s NATO summit in Washington DC, Biden said that it wouldn’t “make sense” to allow Kyiv to attack Moscow, adding that the US was evaluating how far inside Russia Ukraine should be allowed to strike “on a day-to-day basis”.
In May the US gave Ukraine the go-ahead to use weapons supplied by Washington to strike military targets inside Russia following a renewed Russian offensive in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region. However, one month later it limited strikes to targets within 100 kilometres of Ukraine’s border with Russia.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin warned the West in June that Russia would consider supplying weapons to its allies for potential strikes on NATO countries should the bloc’s leaders give Ukraine carte blanche to attack targets on Russian territory.
Biden, who unnerved aids and fellow NATO leaders by mistakenly introducing Zelensky as “President Putin” before correcting himself and joking that Zelensky was a “hell of a lot better”, said that he saw “no good reason” to hold talks with Putin on the war in Ukraine unless the Russian leader was “ready to change his behaviour”.
While the US president conceded that he would be open to speaking with Putin if he “called me and wanted to talk”, he warned that if Russia’s invasion was allowed to succeed, Putin wouldn’t be “stopping at Ukraine".
At a joint press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Thursday, Zelensky urged Kyiv’s partners to “lift all the limitations” on Ukraine striking targets inside Russia, while Stoltenberg said there was “no doubt” Ukraine had the right to use both its own and Western-supplied weapons “to hit legitimate military targets on Russian territory” as part of its self-defence.
