Mattis says U.S. may send arms to Ukraine
KIEV, UKRAINE — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis vowed Thursday to help Ukraine stand up to Russian violations of its sovereignty and signaled that the Trump administration was considering providing defensive weapons to the Ukrainian military.
President Barack Obama had resisted such a step, fearing it would be seen as a provocation by Russia. In the first visit to Ukraine by a U.S. defense secretary in nearly a decade, Mattis seemed to be anticipating that argument.
“Defensive weapons are not provocative unless you are an aggressor, and clearly Ukraine is not an aggressor since it is their territory where the fighting is happening,” Mattis said at a joint news conference with Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko.
State and Defense department officials have recommended that the United States provide Javelin anti-tank missiles and other defensive weapons to Ukraine to strengthen its forces and raise the potential cost to the Kremlin of a Russian attack.
Mattis declined to disclose what he planned to recommend to Trump. But his comments suggested that he was sympathetic to supplying defensive weapons — long a topic of enormous interest in Ukraine.
“On the defensive lethal weapons, we are actively reviewing it,” he said. “I will go back now having seen the current situation and be able to inform the secretary of state and the president in very specific terms what I recommend for the direction ahead.”
While the Obama administration had rejected providing the Javelin antitank system to Ukraine, the context has shifted in recent years.
The failure of the Minsk peace agreement and Russia’s active military posture in the region, have combined to bring the issue to the fore.
Poroshenko sought to buttress Ukraine’s case by saying that it had responsibly used the nonlethal systems it had already received from the United States, and asserting that the anti-tank weapon would be used to deter further Russian aggression.
But the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, strongly opposed the provision of such weapons, saying that they would merely inflame the military situation.