(Washington) The United States “will provide the Ukrainians with more advanced missile systems and ammunition that will allow them to more precisely hit key objectives on the battlefield in Ukraine”, writes Joe Biden in a contribution to The New York Times , broadcast Tuesday by the newspaper.
Posted yesterday at 9:01 p.m.
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 said that the equipment sent to the Ukrainian army would have a range of about 80 kilometers.
It is therefore not a question of very long-range systems, of several hundred kilometres, as the Americans also have.
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.
Indicating that he wanted Ukraine to be “in the strongest possible position” in the event of negotiations with Russia, the American president clarified to him: “We are not encouraging Ukraine and we are not giving ‘Ukraine the means to strike outside its borders’.
Joe Biden has always been concerned since the start of the conflict not to supply weapons which, according to him, would put the United States in a position of co-belligerent alongside the Ukrainians.
In his column in the New York Times, the Democratic president also assures, 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 , whether in private or in public, to make territorial concessions. »
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.
They seized a large part of the strategic city of Sievierodonetsk on Tuesday.
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.
The American Congress recently released a new gigantic envelope, of 40 billion dollars, to finance the sending of armament to Ukraine.