Speaking ahead of a meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, White House national security advisor John Kirby said that the current policy will remain in place.
“There is no change to our view on the provision of long-range strike capabilities for Ukraine to use inside of Russia,” he said, adding that he “would not expect any major announcement in that regard.”
Biden and Starmer were to meet at the White House on Friday afternoon U.S. time.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been pleading with allies for months to let Ukraine fire Western missiles including long-range U.S. ATACMS and British Storm Shadows deep into Russia.
Some of Kyiv’s allies,
including Poland, have urged the U.S. to relax its policy in order to allow Ukraine to better defend its population centers.
Kirby said that the U.S. was taking seriously Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warning he would consider the West directly involved in the conflict if Ukraine fired Western-made long range missiles into Russia, but that it was not a new stance from Putin.
“This is not rhetoric that we haven’t heard from him before,” Kirby said. “He has obviously proven capable of aggression […] so, yeah we take these comments seriously.”
