US has not sent Ukraine arms to use within Russia - State Dept.
The US State Department spokesperson Ned Price claims that they are not encouraging Ukraine to strike beyond its borders.
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A Himars unit in eastern Ukraine (Photo: Anastasia Vlasova/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
Washington has not provided Kiev with weapons that have given it the capability to hit beyond its borders, and the Biden administration does not encourage Ukraine to conduct strikes beyond its borders, US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Tuesday during a press briefing in response to attacks on two Russian air bases earlier this week.
"We are not enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders. We are not encouraging Ukraine to strike beyond its borders," Price said.
The United States has made it clear that the US weapons sent to Ukraine are "defensive supplies," Price pointed out.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the attacks carried out against the two Russian air bases were conducted by Ukrainian drones.
Read: US weapons not used to attack Crimea airbase, Pentagon claims
According to the WSJ, citing defense sources, the US has armed Ukraine with 16 HIMARS rocket launchers, hundreds of drones, missiles, and other weapons.
In June, Ukraine received a batch of HIMARS, weapons set on top of the Ukrainian wishlist, and the Ukrainian Minister of Defense Oleksiy Reznikov thanked, via his Twitter account, his “colleague and friend Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III for these powerful tools!"
An initial four units of the rocket system have already been delivered, kicking off the training program required for Ukrainian soldiers to operate sophisticated and highly accurate weaponry.
Armed with US weapons that continue to fuel the ongoing war, the Ukrainian MoD promised that "summer will be hot for Russian occupiers. And the last one for some of them.”
Washington secretly modified HIMARS missiles
On Monday, US officials told the Wall Street Journal that the US had secretly modified the advanced HIMARS launchers it provided to Ukraine so that they could not be used to launch long-range missiles at Russia.
The officials said it was a precautionary measure that the Biden administration says is necessary to reduce the risk of a broader war with Moscow.
According to US officials, the Pentagon has modified the launchers so that long-range missiles, including the US Army's Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, which has a range of about 200 miles, cannot be fired from them.
