President Donald Trump said Monday the United States will send additional weapons to Ukraine, after Russia claimed new gains in its grinding war against its neighbour.
Trump’s announcement followed Washington saying last week that it was halting some weapons shipments to Kyiv, leaving Ukrainian officials caught off guard and scrambling for clarity.
A pause poses a potentially serious challenge for Kyiv, which is contending with some of Russia’s largest missile and drone attacks of the more than three-year war.
“We’re going to have to send more weapons — defensive weapons primarily,” Trump told journalists at the White House.
“They’re getting hit very, very hard,” he said of Ukraine, while adding that he was “not happy” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and has shown little willingness to end the conflict despite pressure from Trump.
The US president’s pledge to ship more arms to Ukraine came after Moscow said Monday that its forces captured its first village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region after advancing towards it for months.
Russia launched a fresh large-scale drone and missile barrage before the announcement, including on Ukraine’s military recruitment centres.
Kyiv also said it carried out a drone attack on a Russian ammunition factory in the Moscow region.
Russia said its forces captured the village of Dachne in the Dnipropetrovsk region, an important industrial mining territory that has come under mounting Russian air attacks.
Last month, Moscow said its forces had crossed the border into the Dnipropetrovsk region for the first time in its campaign.
Russian forces appear to have made crossing the regional border a key strategic objective in recent months, and deeper advances there could pose logistical and economic problems for Ukraine.
Kyiv has so far denied any Russian foothold in Dnipropetrovsk.
Ukraine’s military said earlier Monday its forces “repelled” attacks in Dnipropetrovsk, including “in the vicinity” of Dachne.
Dnipropetrovsk is not one of the five Ukrainian regions — Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea — that Moscow has publicly claimed as Russian territory.
Describing the situation in Dnipropetrovsk as “difficult” for Kyiv’s forces, Ukrainian military expert Oleksiy Kopytko said Russia hopes to create some kind of buffer zone in the region.
“Our troops are holding their ground quite steadily,” he told AFP.
The White House said last week that it was halting some key weapons shipments to Ukraine that were promised under Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, without providing details on which weapons programmes were affected.
It said the decision was taken after a review of US defence needs and of its military assistance to foreign countries.
Kyiv has long feared halts to US aid after Trump returned to the White House in January, having criticised the tens of billions of dollars in support and weapons sent by Biden.
Under the Biden administration, Washington committed to providing more than $65 billion in military assistance to Ukraine.
Trump has announced no new military aid packages for Kyiv since taking office for the second time.
The Republican president instead has pushed the two sides into peace talks, including in phone calls with Putin. The Russian leader has rejected pleas for a ceasefire and demanded that Ukraine cede more territory if it wants an end to the war.
Ahead of Trump’s remarks on Monday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said air defence remained the “top priority for protecting lives”, and his country was counting on partners to “fully deliver on what we have agreed”.
Explosions were heard overnight to Tuesday in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, mayor Oleksandr Senkevych wrote on Telegram, adding that the “threat of drones” was ongoing.
Mykolaiv regional governor Vitaliy Kim said a fire broke out in the city’s outskirts due to shelling and a 51-year-old man was wounded.
