PNN – A British media outlet has reported on the reasons for the US President’s withdrawal from his threat to provide long-range Tomahawks missiles to Ukraine.
According to the report of Pakistan News Network, citing inews, after intensive and tense negotiations with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, at the White House, US President Donald Trump appears to have decided not to provide Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine.
The Tomahawk missile is a long-range cruise missile that is typically launched from the sea to attack targets deep inside enemy territory.
With a range of 2,500 kilometers, this missile could put 1,945 Russian military targets, including the city of Moscow, within its range, significantly increasing Ukraine’s ability to respond to Russian attacks.
Trump had previously indicated that he would offer the weapons to NATO for delivery to Ukraine. He said during a trip to the occupied territories that “maybe if this war doesn’t get resolved, I’ll give them the Tomahawks.”
But after Saturday’s meeting at the White House, Trump appeared to back down from the idea and expressed hope that the war would end without the use of Tomahawks. Now the question is, what changed Trump’s mind?
Read more:
Lavrov’s reaction to the possibility of the US delivering Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine
The risk of nuclear war
Russia has openly stated that supplying Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine will escalate the war and perhaps even lead to nuclear war.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of the Security Council and former Russian president, warned that it would be impossible to distinguish between Tomahawk missiles with nuclear and non-nuclear warheads after launch, and indirectly said that Russia’s response to such an attack could be nuclear. Medvedev said in this regard: How should Russia respond? Exactly!
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week that “the Tomahawk issue is very worrying,” describing their sale as “a very sensitive moment” that would lead to an escalation of “tensions on all sides.”
Asked whether he was more optimistic about receiving the Tomahawk after meeting at the White House, he replied: “I’m a realist!”
America being dragged into war
After Russia’s threats, it is possible that Trump felt that “providing Tomahawks to Ukraine would mean too much American involvement in the war.”
The Kremlin recently announced that Putin told Trump in a call this week that the sale of Tomahawks to Ukraine would deal a “significant blow” to US-Russian relations and jeopardize peace talks.
Putin said earlier this month that the use of Tomahawks would not be possible without the direct participation of American military experts, and that such intervention would lead to a “new stage of escalation.”
Whether or not Trump considers these statements and threats to be a serious threat to American security, he knows that further American involvement is unlikely to appeal to his core electoral supporters.
Trump won the US presidential election with an isolationist approach to foreign policy issues and a reduction in international aid, promising to end US intervention in foreign “endless wars.”
Concerns about reducing the US arsenal
One of the concerns of Ukraine’s allies during the war has been the oversupply of weapons and the weakening of their domestic arsenals.
Ukraine needs a relatively new version of the Tomahawk missile with a land-based launcher because it does not have the ships and submarines from which these missiles are typically launched.
These ground-based launchers are rare, and the US military reportedly only has two of them.
Trump has said that the US cannot deplete its Tomahawk stockpile, adding that “we need them too, so I don’t know what we can do about it.”