Rubio is on a three-day visit to India (Photo: PTI).
US secretary of state Marco Rubio on Tuesday said Washington had not changed its policy on weapons assistance and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, while asserting that President Donald Trump was “frustrated and angry” over the lack of progress in negotiations to end the war.Rubio, who arrived in Mumbai on Tuesday at the start of a three-day visit to India, said the US wanted to end the conflict amid mounting casualties and the risk of it spreading to other regions, PTI reported.“The President made it very clear, and there are no such changes. So none of that has changed. And I see reporting that it has, which is not accurate,” Rubio told reporters, rejecting reports of a shift in US support for Kyiv.Rubio said the US president was “most certainly angry and frustrated at the lack of progress in those negotiations”.Ukraine has been facing shortages of US-made Patriot air defence systems and PAC-3 interceptors, which can intercept Russian ballistic missiles. Intensified Russian attacks over the past two months have forcedUkrainians to increasingly seek shelter, with air raid alerts becoming part of daily life.
Addressing concerns over the availability of missile interceptors, Rubio said several countries had requested them from Washington, describing them as the “most in-demand product” in the defence sector.“When a country doesn't get interceptors from the United States, it's not because we're denying. We have our own. We have minimum standards that we have to meet internally in our base presence all over the world,” he said.“We have a global defence footprint, and many of our installations around the world are part of defence, air defence. So there's nothing being deliberately denied to Ukraine,” Rubio added.Rubio also rejected allegations that Washington had withheld intelligence that could have helped Ukraine anticipate Russian strikes on October 13 and 18. He said the failure to detect the attacks was not due to a lack of information provided by the US.“That is not because America did not provide information. I saw somebody associated with the Ukrainian government say that people in Ukraine are dying because the US is denying them information. That's scandalous. That's outrageous; that's simply not true. That's not accurate,” he said.On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv had again received no early warning of the attacks from partner countries that had previously shared intelligence.Rubio said the problem could have been related to Ukraine's ability to process and act on the information it received. “That's possible. We are looking at it,” he said.“Our understanding is that, to the extent that happened on the 13th and on the 18th (October), it was a technical matter. It was not the result of any sort of US directive not to provide advance warning of a strike,” Rubio said.“We are providing the same warnings to them now that we always have,” he added.