US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has claimed that Washington is racing to fulfill Ukraine’s weapons wish list, ensuring that Kiev has all that it needs to repel Russia and support the US goal of weakening and isolating Moscow.
“We are doing everything we can as the United States, working around the clock, to deliver our own weapons and . . . organizing and coordinating the delivery of weapons from many other countries so that Ukraine has what it needs,” Sullivan said on Sunday in an NBC News interview. “Weapons are arriving every day, including today.”
Sullivan noted that he and Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had a two-hour telephone call with top Ukrainian defense officials to discuss the weapons systems that Kiev is seeking. The US is working through that list as quickly as possible “to get Ukraine what it needs to strengthen its hand on the battlefield and to strengthen its hand at the bargaining table,” the security advisor said.
Asked by NBC host Chuck Todd whether the US had stopped distinguishing between defensive and offensive weapons, thus opening the door to giving Ukraine more lethal equipment, Sullivan suggested that restraint has all but been eliminated: “Given the nature of the battle, how things have shifted and adjusted and what the Russians have done, frankly – killing civilians, atrocities, war crimes – we have gotten to a place in the United States and across many members of the NATO alliance where the key question is, what does Ukraine need, and how can we provide it to them? That’s work we’re doing every day.”