Ukraine envoy’s SOS: Need missiles
by Mike Glenn · The Washington TimesUkraine achieved major military successes since Russia launched its full-scale invasion more than four years ago aiming to capture Kyiv and overthrow the government within a few days.
The Kremlin’s forces are bogged down in a brutal war of attrition and Ukraine has pioneered low-cost drone operations and repeatedly struck high-value targets deep within Russian territory, including airfields, oil refineries and logistics hubs.
But its envoy to the U.S. said Thursday that a critical gap remains at the technological high end: ballistic missiles. And that gap needs solving right now and Ukraine needs American help to do so.
“This winter we need missiles,” Ambassador Olga Stefanishyna told reporters at a briefing hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “So many people will die over the winter” without them.
Ms. Stefanishyna acknowledged that President Trump has given Ukraine the green light to manufacture its own interceptors for the Patriot missile system, but she said that will only bear fruit somewhere from a year to five years from now.
She said that on the positive front, Tuesday’s White House meeting between Mr. Trump and her president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, went smoother than last year’s acrimonious blowup in the Oval Office.
“This was a great starting point for building diplomacy,” she said at gthe briefing. “We are changing the narrative, building block by block this relationship.”
That relationship has changed since the start of Ukraine’s drone strikes on targets deep inside Russia, she said.
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“This is a point of the war that nobody would have expected,” she said.
The ambassador noted another reflection of a changed tide earlier this year.
Russian President Vladimir Putin requested a temporary U.S.-brokered ceasefire so that Russia’s traditional May 9 Victory Day parade on Red Square could proceed without the threat of Ukrainian strikes.
Russia now lives with the same safety concerns Ukraine has since the war began, Ms. Stefanishnya said.
“Every Russian in Moscow or around the area felt this, this fear of being killed on the Red Square. It caused massive, massive unhappiness for the Russian people,” she said. “They understand that the war is something that now really relates to them.”
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Ms. Stefanishnya has been Ukraine’s envoy to Washington for just under a year. On Thursday, she confirmed reports that she would soon return to Kyiv to respond to corruption charges that she said were not connected to her work. The ambassador said she is not being pushed out of government.
Mr. Zelenskyy “doesn’t want me to resign. He wants me to stay in the position,” she said.
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