In an exclusive interview with Politico, published May 10, Foreign Minister Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba has complained about the West’s reluctance to send weapons to Kiev during the early stages of the conflict between that country and Russia.
He thinks that if the West had done so early, thousands of lives could have been saved.
“If from the very beginning we were heard and received all the weapons we needed, if we didn’t have to spend a lot of time explaining to our European and American partners why we needing specifically one type of weapon and not another, we were able to get all the weapons we needed right now,” Kuleba said in an interview.
He added that the United States spent weeks looking at stockpiles of old Soviet-era weapons around the world that it might send to Ukraine, and only after realizing that such weapons were available. almost no more, then decided to transfer Western weapons.
Mr. Dmytro Kuleba, 41 years old, is Ukraine’s youngest Foreign Minister, has only been in office for more than 2 years but has quickly won the confidence of the President of Ukraine. Photo: Politico
The Ukrainian official acknowledged that the United States had provided Ukraine with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Javelin anti-tank missiles that the country needed from an early age to successfully defend the capital Kiev.
However, he also saw something else here. The allies did not believe that Ukrainian forces would hold out a few weeks before Russia, which has a much larger military size, he said.
According to Kuleba, the turning point was the defense conference at Ramstein Air Base in southwestern Germany, when US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley persuaded their European allies Europe transfers NATO weapons to Ukraine.
In an interview with Politico, Kuleba also said that the goals of the conflict have now changed. What Russia has done to his country has changed the way Ukraine thinks about victory.
When the conflict began, Ukraine saw victory as preventing Russian forces from gaining control of any more territory beyond the status quo it had maintained for the past eight years, now, for Kiev, victory means regain control over the entire territory of Ukraine.
“Of course, the ultimate victory for Ukraine is the liberation of the occupied territories. And Russian payments for everything… for all the losses. [đã] caused to us,” Ukraine’s foreign minister stated.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean an all-out military victory.
Ukraine’s goal and his job now, “as a wartime foreign minister,” he said, is to ensure that Kiev is in the strongest possible position when the time comes to come to the negotiating table to end it. conflict.
That means he will work to get Ukraine as many weapons as it needs, to ensure that the world imposes as many tough sanctions on Russia as possible.
at Blogtuan.info – Source: Soha.vn – Read the original article here
