Ukraine's president seeks to drum up more support at a meeting with key backers as the United States pledges an additional $250 million in aid.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged his Western allies to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles to hit targets inside Russia and increase pressure on Moscow to end the war.
“We need to have this long-range capability, not only on the divided territory of Ukraine, but also on Russian territory, so that Russia is motivated to seek peace,” Zelenskyy said Friday at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG) at Germany's Ramstein air base.
“We need to make Russian cities and even Russian soldiers think about what they need: peace or [Russian President Vladimir] “Putin.”
The United States pledged an additional $250 million in military aid to Ukraine, which was announced by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the meeting of the UDCG, also known informally as the Ramstein group.
It has regularly brought together representatives of some 50 nations supplying arms to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
“We will scale capabilities to meet Ukraine’s evolving needs and deliver them at the speed of war,” Austin said.
Zelensky's presence at the meeting, his first since its creation, was significant and came at a crucial moment in the war after the deadly Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Poltava, in which 55 people were killed and 300 wounded.
Moscow's forces are currently advancing in the Donbas region, and Putin declared on Thursday that capturing the eastern area was his “main goal” in the conflict.
Meanwhile, Ukraine's surprise advance into Russia's Kursk region last month took Russian forces by surprise, though Putin on Thursday played down the offensive, stressing that the move had failed to halt Moscow's advance.
Reporting from Berlin, Al Jazeera's Dominic Kane said Zelenskyy had conveyed the message that Ukraine would have to strike deeply into Russia for Putin to realise that “he is not going to be able to achieve his goals”.
The Ukrainian president thanked countries that had supplied F-16 fighter jets and long-range missile systems like Storm Shadow, but said the country needed more to bring Putin “and the Russian government to the negotiating table.”
But it was unclear whether Zelenskyy would achieve his goals.
Austin had conveyed that the US would give “everything we can, but not necessarily everything Zelensky wants,” Kane told Al Jazeera.
In addition, the German government had established “red lines” to prevent the use of its weapons inside Russian territory.
Since 2022, the Ramstein Group has provided some $106 billion in security aid to Ukraine. The United States, kyiv's largest backer, has contributed a share of more than $56 billion.
Speaking to reporters in Oslo, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war against Ukraine. “I call on China to stop supporting Russia’s illegal war,” he said.
China has previously called similar remarks by NATO “malicious” and biased.
