President Donald Trump said on 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.
‘Difficult’ situation
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.
