US halts some weapons shipments to Ukraine, White House says

The United States has interrupted a few weapons of weapons to kyiv, said the White House, such as the Russian war against Ukraine has intensified.

The decision was made “to put the interests of the United States first” following an examination of the Ministry of Defense of “military support and military assistance to other countries,” the White House spokesman Anna Kelly said on Tuesday.

The United States has sent tens of billions of dollars in military aid in Ukraine since Russia launched its large-scale invasion in February 2022, which led some to the Trump administration to express its concerns that American stocks are too low.

US officials did not immediately say what shipments were interrupted.

The Ukrainian government did not comment on the announcement, although Fedir Venislavskyi, a deputy for the ruling party, said that the decision was “certainly very unpleasant for us”.

“It is painful and in the context of terrorist attacks that Russia commits against Ukraine … It is a very unpleasant situation,” said Veinslavskyi by Reuters’s news agency.

According to Reuters, air defense missiles and precision ammunition are among the affected weapons, according to Reuters. The officials told the media that the break concerned the deliveries of Air Defense Missile Patriot, the precision artillery rounds and other missile systems used by Ukraine.

The decision comes at a difficult time for Ukraine, who said that he had endured his greatest air attack since the start of the Russia’s large-scale invasion this weekend, from more than 500 ballistic and cruise drones and missiles.

Pentagon’s decision is based on concerns that US military stocks fall too low, an American official said in CBS News, although Anna Kelly stressed that “the strength of the American armed forces remains indisputable – you just have to ask Iran”.

In addition, the US Defense Under-Secretary for the Elbridge Colby policy said in a statement that the Defense Ministry “continues to provide the president with solid options to continue military aid to Ukraine”.

However, he added “the ministry examines and rigorously adapts its approach to achieve this objective while preserving the preparation of American forces for the defense priorities of the administration”.

The break occurs less than a week after President Donald Trump discussed the air defenses with the Volodymyr Zelensky from Ukraine at the NATO summit in the Netherlands.

Trump said that US officials “will see if we can make some of them available” when the BBC was asked to provide additional patriotic anti-missile systems in Ukraine.

Referring to his conversation with Zelensky, Trump said: “We sometimes had a little time difficult, but he could not have been more pleasant.”

The two had an animated confrontation in the oval office in March this year. Subsequently, Trump said that he interrupted military aid to Ukraine which had been reserved by the previous administration Biden. Information sharing with Ukraine has also been suspended.

But the two breaks were then lifted.

At the end of April, the United States and Ukraine signed an agreement that would give the United States access to Ukraine mineral reserves in exchange for military assistance.

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke on Tuesday with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin – the first time in more than two and a half years.

They spoke on the phone for more than two hours, said Macron’s office, adding that the French president had urged a ceasefire in Ukraine and that talks start on “solid and lasting conflict regulations”.

The Kremlin said that Putin had “reminded Macron” that the West policy was to blame for the war because it “had the security interests of Russia for many years”.

Last month, Russia’s long-standing leader told a forum in Saint Petersburg that he considered the Russians and the Ukrainians as a single people and “in this sense, all of Ukraine is ours”.

Moscow currently controls approximately 20% of the Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean Peninsula annexed in 2014.

Russia has made slow progress, grinding in Ukraine in recent months and has claimed full control of the Luhansk eastern region this week. He also said that he had seized a territory in the southeast region of Dnipropetrovsk.

Meanwhile, a Ukrainian attack killed three people in a Russian weapon production plant to make drones and radars in Izhevsk, more than 1,000 km (620 miles) from the border with Ukraine.