A day after Trump promises new arms for Ukraine, he warns Kyiv against striking Moscow

After asking Zelensky if Kyiv could hit Moscow, Donald Trump now says the US isn’t planning to provide long-range missiles to Ukraine, as he swings from pressure on one side to the other.

Volodymyr Zelensky shakes hands with Donald Trump during their meeting on the sideline of the NATO summit last month.

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the US wasn’t planning to provide long-range missiles to Ukraine as part of a new aid initiative, and he warned Kyiv against targeting Moscow.

His comments to reporters at the White House came a day after Trump said the US had reached an agreement with European allies to provide new weapons for use by Ukraine and a warning he could impose new tariffs on Russia and its trading partners unless Moscow took steps to halt the three-year-old war.

Trump’s call for Ukraine to avoid hitting Moscow continued his pattern of swinging from pressure on one side to the other to end the war and underscored the uncertainties about his strategy.

Earlier this month, he counselled Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to take the war to Russia and asked whether Kyiv was able to hit Moscow and St Petersburg, according to a senior Ukrainian official familiar with the exchange.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday offered a different account of the call between the two leaders on July 4. Asked about it, Leavitt said Trump “was merely asking a question, not encouraging further killing”. She said he was “working tirelessly” to stop the war.

The conversation took place shortly after a discussion between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which Putin told Trump he would keep fighting if peace talks failed. Trump has since taken a tougher stance, threatening sanctions if Moscow doesn’t move to end the war.

Ukraine has repeatedly targeted sites as far as 1600km inside Russia – including in Moscow and St Petersburg, Putin’s home town – with domestically produced drones over the course of the conflict, now in its fourth year. Russia says most of the drones are downed by its air defences.

The Ukrainian official familiar with the call said Zelensky suggested to the US President during the conversation that Ukraine needed long-range precision American weapons, the sort that would make strikes inside Russia more damaging.

The official added that Trump’s specific style of communication often made it hard to understand exactly what he meant, so “everyone hears what they want to hear”.

Ukraine, which is working on a ballistic-missile program of its own, doesn’t have missiles that can reach Russia’s two main cities. The Biden administration provided it with a small number of ATACMS missiles with a range of about 240km, but limited their use to border areas of the Kursk and Bryansk regions.

Moscow is almost 480km from the nearest Ukrainian-controlled territory and St Petersburg is 850km away. It isn’t unclear how many, if any, ATACMS missiles remain in the Ukrainian arsenal.

Ukrainian officials have long pressed for longer-range weapons such as the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, or JASSM, which it could launch using recently provided F-16 aircraft. The Biden administration considered providing those missiles but decided against it.

Missiles, unlike drones, carry a much larger payload, can penetrate hardened targets and travel at much higher speeds. With hours of warning, Russia usually removes combat aircraft from airfields targeted by long-range Ukrainian drones. Ukrainian strikes in recent months have focused on Russian defence industries, aiming to disrupt the production of drones and missiles that hit Ukrainian cities daily.

Trump has increasingly voiced his frustration over Putin’s continued strikes on Ukraine and the slow pace of peace talks. The US President threatened on Monday to increase economic pressure on Moscow with secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil if there wasn’t a peace deal with Ukraine in 50 days.

He underscored his growing anger with Putin as he outlined a deal to sell advanced weapons to Ukraine in a meeting with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Secretary-General Mark Rutte. The Kremlin said on Tuesday that Putin would respond to Trump if he deemed it necessary.

A senior aide to Putin, Kirill Dmitriev, on Tuesday made a thinly veiled nuclear threat, posting on X footage from the Game of Thrones series and writing: “People who follow Biden’s false narratives and approaches lead the world to Winter.”

Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who heads Putin’s party, dismissed Trump’s warning as “a theatrical ultimatum”, adding on X that Russia “didn’t care”.

People who follow Biden’s false narratives and approaches lead the world to Winter ❄️👇 pic.twitter.com/iN9pvxX1eE

— Kirill A. Dmitriev (@kadmitriev) July 14, 2025

Concerned about the potential for nuclear escalation, the Biden administration initially barred Ukraine from using US-supplied weapons to strike Russian territory. It partially reversed the ban in May last year, after Russia began an ultimately unsuccessful offensive on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, pommelling Ukrainian forces with artillery and rockets fired from just across the border.

Trump has for months urged both sides to engage in peace talks brokered by his administration. Zelensky has agreed to an unconditional ceasefire, something Russia has so far rejected. There have been two meetings between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Turkey. The talks went nowhere after Russia demanded that Ukraine surrender several major cities and disband most of its military.

Trump in June also said Russia and Ukraine might need to “keep fighting” before they were serious about negotiations to end the war.

The Ukrainian official said the Ukrainian President was surprised by the supportive tone of the US leader, who had previously publicly criticised Zelensky but now seemed irritated by Putin’s intransigence. Zelensky at the time described the call with Trump as “the best conversation in all this time”.

The official said Trump told Zelensky that in his call with Putin the Russian leader had raised various topics but had avoided giving any specifics on how he hoped to bring the war to an end.

Russia has called for new economic deals with the US without offering a solution to the Ukraine war. Putin has repeatedly received Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, touted business opportunities in Russia and sought to curry favour with the White House.

The Kremlin has also spent months trying to publicly court Trump and assure him of Russia’s desire for peace, all while intensifying its aerial and ground assaults on Ukraine.

Senior Russian officials appeared to double down on Moscow’s military goals in comments on Tuesday. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Russia wouldn’t react to ultimatums issued by the US side.

“If we can’t achieve our stated goals through diplomacy, then our special military operation will continue,” he said, using a Kremlin euphemism for the invasion.

The Wall Street Journal