The apparent change of heart by President Joe Biden was reported on Sunday by U.S. media, citing sources close to the White House. The news came after one of the
largest missile and drone strikes
by Russia against Ukraine, carried out earlier that day.
“The truth is that the only language Putin understands is the language of force,” said Cezary Tomczyk, a Polish deputy defense minister.
“The only thing he can understand are rockets rather than personal phone calls,” Tomczyk added, in reference to
a conversation
Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, conducted with the Russian president on Friday.
While Tomczyk applauded Biden’s reported U-turn, he said it should have been made earlier.
The Polish defense minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, who is also a deputy prime minister, said he did not think the decision by the White House was “a breakthrough moment.”
He added: “If this was done earlier, it might have been a breakthrough moment, but now we see these disproportions between the Russian Federation and Ukraine.”
Nevertheless, Kosiniak-Kamysz sees the decision as a step in the right direction.
“There cannot be a situation in which there are red lines drawn for Ukraine and no red lines drawn for Russia,” he said.
Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, was more optimistic, describing the apparent shift in the U.S. stance as “a very important change.”
“This fundamentally changes the situation on the front,” Duda said. “It’s a very important, maybe even a breakthrough moment in this war.”
A Kremlin statement issued on Monday said that if missiles provided by the U.S. were used against targets inside Russia, Moscow would view the attack as coming not from Ukraine
but from America itself, the BBC reported.
Biden’s reported move would likely pave the way for London and Paris to grant Kyiv consent to use their long-range Storm Shadow missiles for strikes within Russia, something Ukraine has also long been requesting.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, gave a cautious response to reports of the U.S. policy change, saying “strikes are not carried out with words” and that the “missiles will speak for themselves.”
