Germany will not ship long-range arms to Ukraine

Germany will not supply weapons to Ukraine that could strike the Russian territory, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said, T-Online reports.

"I think everyone else should follow this principle,” Scholz said, making references to a similar decision that American President Joe Biden made earlier.

On August 19, Scholz said that Germany was supplying Ukraine with a lot of weapons.

"This is important to say, we now do this regularly, this is a very effective weapon,” the head of the German government said.

According to him, Germany has already supplied Gepard anti-aircraft tanks to Kyiv and currently plans to ship Cobra artillery radar and Iris-T air defense system.

"Germany will help Ukraine as long as necessary, but there should not be an escalation of the conflict. This is the basic principle,” the German politician added.

Since the beginning of June, Ukrainian diplomats have repeatedly appealed to the German government with a request to ship more weapons to Kyiv, but Berlin tries to avoid new arms supplies, Die Welt wrote. Germany needs the equipment for its own purposes, German officials say.

Washington ordered Kyiv not to use long-range weapons to attack the Russian territory. However, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said that Kyiv could use such weapons to "de-occupy the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine." The restriction will not apply to Crimea, Donbass and other areas occupied by Russian and allied forces, he said.

Later it turned out that the United States allowed the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) to use American weapons in Crimea "for self-defense purposes." An unnamed source at the White House told Politico that "Washington does not select targets and everything we have provided is for self-defense. Any goal that Kyiv decides to pursue on sovereign Ukrainian soil is self-defense by definition.”