The United States must balance Ukraine’s urgent requests for air-defense missiles with similar demands from other allies, as well as the needs of its own military. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this on Tuesday, October 20, UNN reports, citing Bloomberg.
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The United States is responding to many such requests and cannot meet them all, Rubio told reporters in Mumbai on Tuesday.
"I know that one of the things President Zelenskyy has talked about is that he has been trying to purchase interceptor missiles, and I understand that. So is every other country in the world," the U.S. secretary of state said.
He named Saudi Arabia and Israel among the other countries seeking to obtain these weapons and added: "We also have our own needs."
Rubio said he had spoken for about 45 minutes earlier on Tuesday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who, the publication writes, "is embroiled in an escalating dispute with Donald Trump." The U.S. president repeated his criticism on Monday following reports, according to the publication, from officials in Kyiv about restrictions on intelligence sharing.
Rubio said that the U.S. president had never ordered such changes and was upset by reports that were "inaccurate." Referring to reports that some Russian missiles had managed to strike Ukraine without the warnings they usually receive through U.S. intelligence, he said this could have resulted from a technical problem rather than a U.S. directive, the publication writes.
The U.S. secretary of state also sought to play down concerns expressed by some analysts that the United States currently has limited weapons stocks due to the cumulative effect of the war with Iran and the dispatch of a significant amount of weapons to Ukraine earlier, the publication notes.
"I think we are very satisfied with our stocks of various munitions, including interceptors," he said, adding that production had been increased.
"But it takes time to build up these stocks," Rubio emphasized.