Berlin will follow Washington’s lead in allowing Kiev to use Western-supplied weapons systems for long-range attacks on Russian territory, a German government spokesperson said on Friday.
The US and its allies have insisted that providing weapons and equipment to Ukraine does not make them party to the conflict with Russia, and maintained certain restrictions on their use to preserve that perception. Kiev has recently begun to demand the relaxation of those rules, however.
“[Ukraine] can also use the weapons supplied for this purpose [of self-defense] in accordance with its international legal obligations, including those supplied by us,” German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin on Friday.
He claimed that lifting the restrictions is warranted because Russia has “prepared, coordinated and carried out attacks from positions in the Kharkov area in particular from the immediately neighboring Russian border region” over the past month.
Hebestreit also said that Berlin’s decision was based on “consensus among allies,” following high-level talks with the US, UK, and France. Italy has publicly said otherwise, however.
While a number of NATO member states have called for the restrictions to be lifted, the US claimed to be against it until Thursday evening, when President Joe Biden supposedly relented and “secretly” gave his blessing to Kiev.
According to an unnamed US official, Biden “recently” instructed his aides to greenlight Ukraine’s use of US weapons “for counter-fire purposes” in Kharkov Region alone. The decision supposedly excluded long-range ATACMS missiles, but not Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS), High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), and tube artillery.
While Ukraine has claimed that Western restrictions prevented it from attacking Russian troops in Belgorod Region, that has not stopped Kiev’s forces from routinely shelling civilians far behind the front line.
Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that using long-range weapons against Russia would have “serious consequences” for the West. Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chief of Russia’s Security Council, has said that Moscow already considers all of Ukraine’s long-range systems to be directly controlled by NATO personnel, and their use as “taking part in a war against us.”
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