It seems US President Joe Biden and British PM Keir Starmer have delayed a decision to allow Ukraine to conduct deep strikes into Russian territory with long-range Western-supplied missiles, a plea Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly floated.
Referring to his "productive" talks with Biden in Washington, Starmer said it "wasn't a meeting about a particular capability" pertaining to the UK-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles.
He also added that he and Biden would now discuss the plan at the UN General Assembly in New York the week after next "with a wider group of individuals."
The White House had earlier played down the chances of a decision in favor of the Kiev regime, with National Security Council spokesman John Kirby telling reporters that he wouldn't expect “any major announcement in that regard coming out of the discussions, certainly not from our [US] side.”
Zelensky in turn accused the West of being "afraid" to even help Ukraine shoot down incoming missiles as it has done with Israel.
The Biden-Starmer talks came after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Western countries not to let Ukraine fire long-range missiles at Russia. Putin stressed that such a move would mean NATO, the US and European countries’ "direct participation" in the Ukraine conflict.
The direct involvement of the West in the conflict changes its nature, and Moscow will be forced to make decisions based on the threats thus created for it, according to the Russian president.
The Times has meanwhile cited an unnamed British defense source as saying that although the Storm Shadow missiles can be effectively "threaded through the eye of a needle" with the help of GPS and terrain mapping data, they "probably wouldn’t survive in the contested, electronically jammed environment" that the Russian forces possess.
"Russian electronic warfare has rendered GPS useless. They jam it," the source said. A Storm Shadow has a maximum range of 250 km (155 miles) and is worth a whopping $1 million a piece.