Kyiv, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has asked allies to speed up supplies of arms as Russia intensifies its attacks on eastern Ukraine and sends in waves of troops to breach strong Ukrainian defences.
“Russia hopes to prolong the war and exhaust our armed forces,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly address on Sunday. “So we must make time our weapon. We need to speed up events, speed up the delivery and opening of new necessary weapon options for Ukraine.”
The United States and several European countries pledged last week to send dozens of main battle tanks, which are among the most powerful weapons they have promised Ukraine, but Western officials have said so it could be months before the tanks are delivered.
Mr Zelensky’s appeal for both quicker deliveries of promised weapons and quicker decisions on deploying additional weapons — including long-range missiles and even warplanes — comes amid warnings that Moscow plans to launch a major offensive in the coming weeks, a year after Russia’s launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Western allies have not publicly indicated whether they will supply fighter jets, but throughout the war they have sent Ukraine an ever-expanding array of advanced weaponry that many once considered taboo. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that further arms deliveries from the West to Ukraine would lead to a “significant escalation” of the conflict.
Military experts and allies say Ukraine will also launch an offensive in the coming weeks aimed at driving Russia out of the occupied territories.
Britain’s Defense Ministry said on Monday Moscow was “probably keeping the option open” to announce a further “partial mobilization” of men with military experience for its war effort in Ukraine. In September, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin announced the first such callby around 300,000 reservists, a move that led to widespread protests.
According to Ukrainian officials, Russia is currently “flooding” Ukraine’s positions in the east. “They just throw corpses at our positions and troops and gradually move forward,” Serhiy Haidai, the head of the Luhansk regional military administration, said on national television on Sunday evening.
As the war has unfolded, so has the type of military aid that Ukraine’s allies are willing to provide to Ukraine. First, it was small arms like the Javelin and NLAW anti-tank weapons that helped delay Russian forces and then pushed them back out of Kyiv and other northern cities. Then the focus shifted to artillery to help Kyiv balance Russian supplies. This allowed Ukraine to make gains in the east through July.
The arrival of precision missile systems like the American-made HIMARS helped Ukraine set the stage for its two most successful operations. Retake Kharkiv in the Northeast, and then the southern city of Kherson.
After Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced last week that his government would send battle tanks, he reiterated over the weekend that Berlin would not send any warplanes to Ukraine. The United States has not indicated that it will send jets. European nations with American-made jets could decide to move theirs to Ukraine, but only if Washington approves those transactions.
Long-range missiles are crucial “to drastically limit the Russian army’s key tool” by destroying weapons caches, Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Mr Zelenskyi, said over the weekend. Colonel Yuriy Ihnat, spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force, said last week that F-16 fighter jets would play a dual role in Ukraine, as part of air defense and as “force for strikes against the enemy.”
Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, said fighter jets and long-range missiles remain high on the military’s wish list, adding he was confident talks between Ukraine’s western allies would result in new commitments in the coming weeks.
“For me, anything that is impossible today will be possible tomorrow,” he said in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that aired Sunday.
Ivan Nekhepurenko contributed reporting.
