While US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting Ukraine, lawmakers from Kyiv are on a trip to Washington. They're hoping to persuade politicians there to allow Ukraine to use US-supplied weapons to strike targets inside Russia. Davyd Arakhamia, the chairman of Ukraine's ruling "Servant of the People" party, spoke to DW.
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00:00 So you are meeting with lawmakers here in Washington. What's the main purpose of your visit this time?
00:05 Yeah, there are two purposes. The first purpose is a thank you purpose because
00:10 finally we voted, they voted, the package for Ukraine which is very important especially now.
00:17 And second is try to use their congressional power to put the pressure on the White House
00:26 to change the policy where Ukrainians having the weapons cannot hit
00:32 targets that are on the Russian territory because right now the Russians are
00:38 attacking Ukrainian cities, Kharkiv in particular, from the Russian territory.
00:44 And that situation would never be happened if we would have permission to use the weapons against
00:50 those logistical centers, command centers and so on. So we do not talk about civilian
00:57 targets that's for sure, only military targets close to the Ukrainian border. But unfortunately
01:02 for now there is still a political block on this. So we had previous successful experience
01:08 where lawmakers putting enough pressure on the White House and they changed the policy.
01:12 How are lawmakers or how is the White House arguing? Why do they not allow you to use the
01:19 weapons you obviously have on Russian territory? Well, the main argument never changed since the
01:26 very beginning of the war. We believe that it would be too escalatory and there will be some
01:31 additional escalation from Russian side. We live in the war for two and a half years already. We
01:36 know that there is nothing to escalate. It's already escalated at top level. Right now we
01:42 have an attack to Kharkiv, the city is twice bigger as Washington DC. Millions of people
01:48 are living there. So we have to protect the city. There is nothing that they can escalate.
01:52 They are already putting gliding bombs, very huge ones, destroying houses,
01:58 basically wiping the city. So we don't know what could be more escalatory.