Washington will deliver “to the Ukrainians more advanced missile systems and ammunition that will allow them to more accurately hit key targets on the battlefield in Ukraine,” writes Joe Biden in a contribution to the New York Times, published Tuesday by the newspaper. .
A senior White House official said in an interview with the press that it was Himars (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System), that is to say multiple rocket launchers mounted on light armor.
He indicated that this equipment, the number of which was not specified, would have a range of about 80 kilometers.
These are therefore not very long-range systems, several hundred kilometers, as the Americans also have, but they are nevertheless a significant reinforcement of Ukrainian capabilities.
Indicating that he wanted Ukraine to be “in the strongest possible position” in the event of negotiations with Russia, the American president wrote to him: “We do not encourage Ukraine and we do not give ‘Ukraine the means to strike outside its borders’.
The senior White House official told him that “the Ukrainians had provided assurances that they would not use these systems against Russian territory.”
Since the start of the conflict, Joe Biden has always been concerned not to supply weapons which, according to him, would put the United States in a situation of co-belligerents alongside the Ukrainians.
– $700 million –
This equipment is part of a new broader component of US military assistance to Ukraine, totaling $700 million, details of which are to be given on Wednesday.
The Ukrainians had for some time been calling for multiple rocket launchers that would allow them to hit Russian positions in depth while placing their batteries further from the front.
Russian forces have the stated objective of controlling the entire large mining basin of Donbass, of which pro-Russian separatist forces backed by Moscow took partial control in 2014.
In his column in the New York Times, the American president assures us, at a time when the Ukrainian army is facing an extremely intense Russian offensive in the east of the country, that he “will not put pressure on the Ukrainian government, that whether in private or in public, for him to make territorial concessions.”
This clarification comes after a series of calls from former diplomats or commentators to quickly launch peace negotiations, some of which, such as former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, seem to believe that this will pass for kyiv by the sacrifice of certain territories in the east.
Joe Biden, who orchestrated the Western response to Vladimir Putin, finally assures in his tribune that the cohesion between Westerners remains intact: if the Russian president “expects us to hesitate or that we divide in the next months, he is wrong.”
