War in Ukraine: the United States will deliver long-range rockets to kyiv

The news was greeted with gratitude.

On Friday, the United States pledged to deliver longer-range rockets to Ukraine as part of new US military aid worth $2.2 billion.

These new weapons could almost double the range of the Ukrainian strike force, the Pentagon said.

In particular, these are devices fired from the ground that can reach a target located 150 km away and therefore threaten Russian positions behind the front lines.

"The handover of the GLSDB (

) will not take place for several months," however, said a Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Garron Garn, citing production and delivery schedules.

He was also unable to specify the number for “security reasons”.

"The longer the range of our weapons and the more our troops are mobile, the sooner Russia's brutal aggression will end," responded Volodymyr Zelensky in the evening.

The Ukrainian army will defend "as long as it can" Bakhmout, a key city in the East which Russian soldiers have been seeking for months to seize, "no one will abandon" this "fortress", a- he also hammered on this occasion.

Hope for Donbass

Nearly a year into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, this city has become the epicenter of the fighting, and Moscow's forces have made small territorial gains in the region in recent weeks at heavy cost. losses.

Read alsoWith the Ukrainian artillerymen of Bakhmout: "We will prevent the Russians from seizing the city"

"If the (Western's) arms deliveries to kyiv are accelerated, especially long-range weapons, not only are we not going to withdraw from Bakhmout, (but) we are going to start ending the occupation of the Donbass,” an eastern region partly in Russian hands, the Ukrainian president said.

At the same time, Paris announced that France and Italy would provide a MAMBA medium-range surface-to-air defense system in the spring to help Ukraine "defend against attacks by drones, missiles and Russian planes.