Live updates: Russia’s war in Ukraine
The United States is “very focused” on providing air defense systems to Ukraine, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN on Wednesday.
“We’re now very focused on air defense systems and not just us, many other countries,” Blinken told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
“And we’re working to make sure that the Ukrainians get those systems as quickly as possible but also as effectively as possible, making sure that they are trained on them, making sure they have the ability to maintain them, and all of that has to come together and it is. We have a very deliberate process established by the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in Ramstein, Germany, that meets regularly to make sure that the Ukrainians are getting what they need, when they need it.”
Blinken was speaking from Bucharest, Romania, where he is attending a meeting of NATO foreign ministers.
While Blinken would not elaborate on whether the Pentagon would provide the Patriot missile defense system to Ukraine, he told Amanpour that the United States had been working on making sure that “at any given time, [the Ukrainians] have the most effective systems possible to deal with the threat they are facing.”
“We just recently, for example, provided them with a very effective system called NASAMS that they are using very effectively. Before that of course, we had the HIMARS, which they used to great effect both in southern and eastern Ukraine,” Blinken said.