Ukraine’s FM says Western weapons came too late

Ukraine’s foreign minister has lamented Western reluctance to send Kyiv weapons early in the conflict, saying had they done so, thousands of lives may have been saved.
“If we had been heard from the very beginning on all the weapons that we need to receive, if we didn’t have to spend hours and days explaining to partners in Europe and in the United States why we need specifically this weapon and not another one, we would have received all these weapons by now,” Dmytro Kuleba said in an interview with Politico.

He added the US had spent weeks looking at stockpiles of old Soviet weapons around the world that it could send to Ukraine and then realised these were nearly empty before deciding to send Western weapons.

Kuleba said the turning point was the meeting at Germany’s Ramstein Air Base when US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley convinced European allies to transition Ukraine from Soviet to NATO weapons.