President Donald Trump announced Monday that the United States will send additional weapons to Ukraine, after Russia claimed new gains in its grinding war against its neighbour. Trump’s announcement followed Washington saying last week that it was halting some weapons shipments to Kyiv, leaving Ukrainian officials caught off guard and scrambling for clarity.
A pause posed a potentially serious challenge for Kyiv, which is contending with some of Russia’s largest missile and drone attacks of the more than three-year war. “We’re going to have to send more weapons — defensive weapons primarily,” Trump told journalists at the White House. “They’re getting hit very, very hard,” he said of Ukraine, while adding that he was “not happy” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and has shown little willingness to end the conflict despite pressure from Trump. The US president’s pledge to ship more arms to Ukraine came after Moscow said Monday that its forces captured its first village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region after advancing towards it for months. Russia launched a fresh large-scale drone and missile barrage before the announcement, including on Ukraine’s military recruitment centers. Kyiv also said it carried out a drone attack on a Russian ammunition factory in the Moscow region.
Describing the situation in Dnipropetrovsk as “difficult” for Kyiv’s forces, Ukrainian military expert Oleksiy Kopytko said Russia hopes to create some kind of buffer zone in the region. “Our troops are holding their ground quite steadily,” he told AFP. The White House said last week that it was halting some key weapons shipments to Ukraine that were promised under Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, without providing details on which weapons programmes were affected. Kyiv has long feared halts to US aid after Trump returned to the White House in January.