U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and British Foreign Minister David Lammy visited Kyiv on Wednesday for a series of meetings with senior Ukrainian government officials at a critical juncture in the war against Russia, APA reports citing Reuters.
Blinken has said he wants to hear directly from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and others what Kyiv's goals in the war are and what Washington can do to help it achieve them.
"I think it's a critical moment for Ukraine in the midst of what is an intense fall fighting season with Russia continuing to escalate its aggression," Blinken told a joint news conference with Lammy in London on Tuesday.
Zelenskiy has been pleading for Western countries to supply longer-range missiles and to lift restrictions on using them to hit targets such as military airfields deep inside Russia.
U.S. officials have voiced doubts about such a move amid fears of instigating a direct conflict between the West and Russia, but overnight U.S. President Joe Biden suggested that there was room for compromise.
Biden said his administration was "working that out now" when asked if the United States would lift restrictions on Ukraine's use of long-range weapons in its war against Russia.
The speaker of Russia's lower house of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, said on Wednesday that Moscow would consider the U.S. and its allies to be parties to the war if they allowed Kyiv to use long-range weapons.
Blinken has declined to say whether Washington would allow the use of long-range weapons deep inside Russia, but said multiple factors went into the consideration of this decision rather than just looking at it as a weapons system.
"It's not just the system itself that counts. You have to ask: Can the Ukrainians effectively use it, and sometimes that requires significant training, which we've done. Do they have the ability to maintain it?" Blinken said.
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