UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has vowed to send hundreds of attack drones and other military equipment to Ukraine after face-to-face talks with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday.
The Ukrainian president arrived in Britain after visiting other European capitals over the weekend as he sought to bolster support ahead of a anticipated counteroffensive by the country’s army to recapture the territory occupied by Russian forces.
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters the Kremlin had an “extremely negative” view of Britain providing Kiev with weapons capable of hitting Russian targets far behind the front line.
Sunak said it was “very interesting” to hear from the Kremlin, but said the UK was “not leaving” and Britain was “here for the long haul”.
In a tweet before the meeting, Zelenskyy said: “The UK is a leader when it comes to expanding our capabilities on the ground and in the air. This cooperation will continue today.”
After the talks, he was asked if Ukraine he was waiting for more weapons before starting his counteroffensive. “We really need more time,” he said. “Not too much. We’ll be ready in some time.”
Sunak confirmed the supply of hundreds of air defense missiles and more unmanned aerial systems, including hundreds of unspecified attack drones with a range of more than 200 km, a weapons system not known to be in use with the military. British.
The promise of new weapons for both defensive and offensive purposes came after the UK announced last week that it had provided Storm Shadow standoff weapons to Ukraine, the first long-range cruise missile in the kyiv arsenal.
Downing Street said the additional weaponry would be provided in the “next few months”. Sunak hosted the Ukrainian leader at Checkers, the prime minister’s country retreat outside London.
Zelenskyy renewed his call for Western-built fighter jets, saying he wanted to create a “jet coalition” among allied countries because “we cannot control the sky.”
Britain had previously said it would provide training for pilots, but Downing Street said on Monday it would not send fighter jets to Ukraine. kyiv favors the US-built F-16 jet, which is widely operated by NATO and other air forces, though not the UK. Washington has so far ruled out supplying the plane.
“This is a pivotal moment in Ukraine’s resistance to a terrible war of aggression that they did not choose or provoke,” Sunak said. “We must not let them down. The front lines of Putin’s war of aggression may be in the Ukraine, but the fault lines stretch across the globe.”
The UK provided £2.3bn worth of military support to Ukraine last year and was the first country to offer to supply main battle tanks. The UK said last month it had completed the delivery of a “squad” of Challenger 2, believed to number at least 14 tanks, along with other weapons including armored vehicles and self-propelled guns.
The UK has also trained 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers in Britain since last year’s full-scale invasion of Russia and had previously helped train the country’s armed forces in Ukraine, along with other NATO members, after they Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014.
Before arriving in the UK, Zelensky had traveled to Rome, Berlin and Paris over the weekend for talks with Italian, German and French leaders and received more pledges of military aid.
The Ukrainian military has spent months planning a counteroffensive to drive Russian forces out of the eastern and southern regions that make up almost a fifth of the country.
Fighting intensified around the shelled eastern city of Bakhmut, where Ukrainian forces launched counterattacks on the flanks of the city that Russian forces mostly control but have struggled to fully capture for nine months.