June 5 (UPI) -- President Vladimir Putin on Sunday warned that Russia will strike targets, which he did not specify, if the West supplies Ukraine with longer-range missiles.
"If it now comes to rockets and they are supplied, we will draw conclusions from that and employ our weapons that we have in sufficient quantities to strike those facilities that we are not attacking so far," Putin warned in an excerpt from a wide-ranging interview with state media Rossyia 1.
Putin said that the "additional deliveries of armaments" shows that Ukraine and the West have the "sole objective of stretching out the armed conflict as long as possible."
The Russian president was asked about an announcement made by President Joe Biden in a guest article for The New York Times last week that the U.S. would supply Ukraine with "more advanced rocket systems and munitions that will enable them to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield in Ukraine."
Putin said that such deliveries "changes nothing" because Kyiv already had an inventory of such systems, downplaying them as comparable to Russia's rocket systems.