France’s president Emmanuel Macron stated on 28 May that Ukraine should be allowed to use weapons supplied by allies to “neutralize” Russian military bases firing missiles into Ukraine, reports The Guardian. However, Macron added: “We should not allow them to touch other targets in Russia, and obviously civilian capacities.”
Macron made these comments during a state visit to Germany, whose chancellor, Olaf Scholz, appeared to back Ukraine on the matter. According to The Guardian, Scholz said he “agreed with the French president as long as the Ukrainians respected the conditions of the weapons’ suppliers.”
The report notes that Scholz has refused to supply Germany’s Taurus cruise missiles sought by Ukraine, which are “capable of powerful strikes on Russian positions inside Ukraine and deep into Russia.”
The NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg told The Economist that alliance members “should let Ukraine strike deep into Russia with Western weapons.”
However, The Guardian states, “the White House on Tuesday ruled out such a possibility for US-supplied weapons.” The National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby says: “There’s no change to our policy at this point. We don’t encourage or enable the use of US-supplied weapons to strike inside Russia.”
The article mentions that Vladimir Putin “warned of ‘serious consequences’ if Russia is struck with Western weapons,” which it characterizes as “repeating a pattern of routine but vague and unfulfilled threats towards Ukraine’s allies.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the Russian daily Izvestia, “we see that there is no consensus on this issue,” which The Guardian describes as “gloating over persisting differences in the West.”
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