PRAGUE, Sept 14 (Askume) – Ukraine has good military justification to use Western weapons to penetrate deeper into Russia, a senior NATO military official said on Saturday.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer met US President Joe Biden at the White House on Friday , while Ukraine’s allies discussed whether to allow Kiev to use long-range missiles against Russian targets.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said that if the West allows Ukraine to be attacked with long-range missiles made by the West, it would lead to an all-out war with Russia.
At a meeting of the military council of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the alliance’s top military body, in Prague, its chairman, Admiral Rob Ball, said the law of armed conflict gives any country the right to defend itself and that this right is limited only to its own circumstances.
He also said that the countries providing weapons also have the right to ban their use.
“From a military perspective, you make these attacks because you want to weaken the enemy attacking you so that you can not only repel the arrows that are coming at you, but also attack the archers,” he said.
“So from a military point of view, there are good reasons to do this; to weaken the enemy, to weaken his logistics, fuel and ammunition.”
The other side of the discussion is political, he said, because countries providing weapons may feel responsible for them while political talks are ongoing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has urged his allies to allow Ukraine to use Western missiles, including US long-range missiles and British Storm Shadow missiles, to limit Moscow’s strike capabilities .
Putin said on Thursday that the actual programming of the missile’s flight path would be carried out by NATO military personnel as Kiev does not have such capability on its own.
