Former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump Jr. slammed the Biden administration in an opinion piece to The Hill following reports from The New York Times last week that said that the president signaled an openness to allowing Ukraine to use long-range missiles in Russia.

“At a time when American leaders should be focused on finding a diplomatic off-ramp to a war that should never have been allowed to take place, the Biden-Harris administration is instead pursuing a policy that Russia says it will interpret as an act of war,” they wrote, referencing past statements from Russian President Vladimir Putin where he warned threatened NATO countries of war if long-range weapons were to be allowed to strike inside Russia.

Biden brushed off Putin’s threat after a meeting between the president and Britain’s prime minister, The Hill reported last week.

“This would in a significant way change the very nature of the conflict,” Putin said last week. “It would mean that NATO countries, the US, European countries, are at war with Russia.” 

The opinion piece comes after The New York Times reported that Biden “appears on the verge of clearing the way for Ukraine to launch long-range Western weapons deep inside Russian territory, as long as it doesn’t use arms provided by the United States,” according to European officials.

“We are working that our right now,” The New York Times reported Biden saying in response to whether he would allow Western-provided long-range missiles to target different sites within Russia.

Leading House Republicans urged Biden to reverse weapons restrictions preventing Ukraine from using American-made weapons to target areas inside Russia last week.

Lawmakers like Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, argued in a letter that the restrictions have affected Kyiv’s “ability to defeat Russia’s war of aggression and have given the Kremlin’s forces a sanctuary from which it can attack Ukraine with impunity.”

Reps. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), chair of the defense subcommittee on the House Appropriations Committee, Thomas Kean (R-N.J.), chair of the European subcommittee under Foreign Affairs, and Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), a congressional commissioner at The Helsinki Commission, were among some of the other signatories.

“As long as it is conducting its brutal, full-scale war of aggression, Russia must not be given a
sanctuary from which it can execute its war crimes against Ukraine with impunity,” they wrote. “The Biden-Harris administration’s senseless restrictions, combined with the longstanding slow-rolling of critical weapons approvals and deliveries, are hindering Ukraine’s ability to bring this war to a victorious conclusion.”

Updated on Sept. 18 at 12:03 p.m. EDT