U.S. President Joe Biden said he’ll give Ukraine “advanced rocket systems” and other weaponry to better hit targets in its war with Russia, according to Bloomberg.
“I’ve decided that we will provide the Ukrainians with more advanced rocket systems and munitions that will enable them to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield in Ukraine,” Biden wrote in the New York Times on Tuesday evening.
The move comes more than three months after President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with the conflict shifting into a brutal town-by-town grind as Russian forces try to consolidate territory in the country’s east.
In his essay, Biden didn’t specifically say he would send Ukraine the Multiple Launch Rocket Systems that can strike targets from a far longer distance, but world leaders including UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson have been publicly calling for such a move in recent weeks and that appeared to be what his essay was signaling.
Biden administration officials have vowed to weaken Russia so that it can’t again attack a neighbor, imposing a slew of sanctions on Moscow and bolstering Ukraine’s military with billions of dollars in weapons. But the goal of evicting Russian forces from Ukraine seems distant, even after President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s military forced Moscow to scale back its early effort to capture Kyiv and quickly replace the government.
“If Russia does not pay a heavy price for its actions, it will send a message to other would-be aggressors that they too can seize territory and subjugate other countries,” Biden wrote. “It could mark the end of the rules-based international order and open the door to aggression elsewhere, with catastrophic consequences the world over.”