The United Kingdom will provide Ukraine with additional military aid, including long-range attack drones, 10 Downing Street announced during a visit from President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky met with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday at Chequers, a sit-down that comes ahead of this week’s Council of Europe and G-7 summits.
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Sunak announced that the U.K. would provide Ukraine with hundreds of air defense missiles and further unmanned aerial systems, including hundreds of new long-range attack drones with a range of over 120 miles, less than a week after the U.K. promised the country Storm Shadow cruise missiles, the first long-range missiles in Ukraine’s arsenal.
“This is a crucial moment in Ukraine’s resistance to a terrible war of aggression they did not choose or provoke. They need the sustained support of the international community to defend against the barrage of unrelenting and indiscriminate attacks that have been their daily reality for over a year," Sunak said in a statement. “We must not let them down. The frontlines of Putin’s war of aggression may be in Ukraine but the fault lines stretch all over the world. It is in all our interest to ensure Ukraine succeeds and Putin’s barbarism is not rewarded."
The prime minister’s office also said that the U.K. will soon begin a new flight program to train Ukrainian pilots “to handle different types of aircraft,” part of “U.K. efforts to work with other countries on providing F16 jets – Ukraine’s fighter jets of choice.”
The U.K. had announced it would start training Ukrainian pilots on NATO-standard fighter jets in February.
“Today we talked about the jets – a very important topic for us,” Zelensky said. “We want to create this jet coalition, and I’m very positive about it. We spoke about it. And I see that in the closest time, you will hear some, I think, very important decisions, but we have to work a little bit more about it.”
Sunak noted, however, that his country will be "a key part of the coalition of countries that provides that support to Volodymyr and Ukraine. It is not a straightforward thing … to build up that fighter combat aircraft capability."
Zelensky's visit comes ahead of Ukraine's highly anticipated counteroffensive, which he said late last week is not quite ready to move forward. The U.K. and other countries have provided Ukraine with billions of dollars worth of military aid in recent months to prepare it for the mission.
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"With [what we already have], we can go forward and, I think, be successful," the Ukrainian president said. "But we'd lose a lot of people. I think that's unacceptable. So we need to wait. We still need a bit more time."
Ukrainian officials have already begun downplaying the expected outcomes from the offensive, in part because many experts believe the Western world's support to Ukraine could be swayed by their success, or lack thereof.