Washington, Oct 18: President Donald Trump is set to host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for talks at the White House on Friday, with the US leader signalling he’s not ready to agree to sell Kyiv a long-range missile system that the Ukrainians say they desperately need.Zelenskyy gets his one-on-one with Trump a day after the US president and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a lengthy phone call to discuss the conflict.
In recent days, Trump had shown openness to selling Ukraine long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, even as Putin warned that such a move would further strain the US-Russian relationship.
But following Thursday’s call with Putin, Trump appeared to downplay the prospects of Ukraine getting the missiles, which have a range of about 1,600 km.
“We need Tomahawks for the United States of America too,” Trump said. “We have a lot of them, but we need them. I mean we can’t deplete our country.”
Zelenskyy had been seeking the weapons that would allow Ukrainian forces to strike deep into Russian territory and target key military sites, energy facilities and critical infrastructure.
Zelenskyy has argued such strikes would help compel Putin to take Trump’s calls for direct negotiations to end the war more seriously.
But Putin warned Trump during the call that supplying Kyiv with the Tomahawks “won’t change the situation on the battlefield, but would cause substantial damage to the relationship between our countries,” according to Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser.