The U.S. decision to provide Ukraine with lethal weapons will only fuel hostilities and raise casualties from the conflict in the country's east, Russian officials and lawmakers warned Saturday, according to The Associated Press (AP).
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has called the U.S. decision to provide Ukraine with lethal weapons a "transatlantic vaccination against the Russian virus of aggression."
Canadian Foreign Secretary Chrystia Freeland says putting Ukraine on the Automatic Firearms Country Control List (AFCCL) is only the first step, according to an UNIAN correspondent.
Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said the supply of lethal weapons to Ukraine will untie the hands of Ukrainian nationalists, according to an UNIAN correspondent in Russia.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., likes where the Trump administration is going with its reported approval of commercial sale of lethal defensive arms to Ukraine, but wants to see the president offer much more in the way of weapons to counter an imposing Russian threat in the region, according to The Washington Examiner.
United States Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker says that the U.S. hasn't made any decision on arming Ukraine, according to the U.S. edition of the POLITICO magazine.
Texas-based AirTronic USA, Inc., an electromechanical engineering design and manufacturing company, has been shipping lethal weapons, namely shoulder-fired rocket launchers, to Ukraine since 2016, according to journalists of Voice of America (VoA).
President Donald Trump will be presented with the recommendation to finance and sell anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainian government — a move aimed at deterring aggression from pro-Russian separatists, a State Department official told ABC News.