Ukraine and its western allies are in “accelerated” talks over the possibility of equipping the occupied country with long-range missiles and military aircraft, a senior adviser to Ukraine’s president said on Saturday.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Ukraine’s supporters in the west “understand how the war is developing” and the need to supply aircraft capable of providing cover for the armored fighting vehicles, which the United States and Germany pledged at the beginning of the month.

However, in a comment to online video channel Freedom, Podolyak said that some of Ukraine’s western partners maintain a “conservative” stance on arms sales “for fear of changes in the international architecture.” Russia and North Korea have accused the West of prolonging the war and playing a direct role in it by sending increasingly sophisticated weapons to Kyiv.

“We have to work with it. We need to show (our partners) the true picture of this war,” Podolyak said, without naming specific countries. “We have to speak rationally and say to them, for example, ‘This and that will reduce the death toll, this will reduce the strain on infrastructure. And we do it”

The US and Germany on Wednesday agreed to share advanced tanks with Ukraine along with previously promised Bradley and Marder vehicles, a decision supported not only by the Kremlin but also by the Prime Minister of NATO and EU member Hungary was criticized.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban claimed on Friday that Western countries, which have provided arms and money to support Ukraine in its war with Russia, have “drifted” into active participants in the conflict. Orban has refused to send arms to neighboring Ukraine and has tried to block EU funds for military aid.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry said it would summon the Hungarian ambassador to complain about Orban’s remarks. A ministry spokesman, Oleg Nikolenko, said Orban had told reporters Ukraine was “a no man’s land” and compared it to Afghanistan.

“Such statements are completely unacceptable. Budapest continues on its course of intentionally destroying Ukrainian-Hungarian relations,” Nikolenko said in a Facebook post.

President Joe Biden’s announcement that the US would send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine shattered months of arguments by Washington that they were too difficult to operate and maintain for Ukrainian troops.

The US decision persuaded Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who had expressed concern over a unilateral action that drew the wrath of Russia, to agree to the delivery of 14 Leopard 2 tanks from German stocks and allow European countries with tanks to buy some of theirs to send tanks.

Amid news of the coordinated effort, Russia bombarded Ukraine with rockets, exploding drones and artillery shells. Attacks continued on Saturday when Russian missiles hit the town of Kostyantynivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk province.

The rockets fell into a residential area, killing three civilians, injuring 14 and damaging four high-rise apartment buildings, a hotel and garages, Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said.

“Kostiantynivka is a city that is relatively far from the front line, but still suffers constant enemy attacks. Anyone who stays in the city is in mortal danger,” Kyrylenko said. “The Russians are targeting civilians because they are unable to fight the Ukrainian army.”

In a separate Telegram post earlier Saturday, Kyrylenko reported that Russian attacks in the province killed a total of four civilians and wounded seven others over a 24-hour period.

Russian missiles hit a residential area in the Donestsk town of Chasiv Yar on Friday evening, killing two people and wounding five others, the governor said. Photos attached to Kyrylenko’s mail showed a three-story school building on fire.

Donetsk province, where territory is roughly divided between Russian and Ukrainian control, has become the combat epicenter of the war as Moscow attempts to unleash a months-long, grueling offensive to capture the city of Bakhmut.

Located on a hill strategically positioned to defend Bakhmut, Chasiv Yar has come under increased Russian fire. Capturing Bakhmut would allow Russian troops to cut off Ukraine’s supply lines and potentially open the way for them to threaten Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the largest Ukrainian-held cities in the east of the country.

Russian forces continued ground attacks around Bakhmut and Avdiivka, another city in southern Donetsk, while Ukrainian troops were on the offensive in south and north-eastern Ukraine, Ukraine’s military said in an update Saturday morning.

The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said Russian troops were “defending” near Lyman in Luhansk and Kharkiv provinces north of Donetsk, and in Kherson and Zaporizhia provinces to the south.

Fighting had largely stalled in recent months as winter conditions slowed ground operations and neither side reported significant progress.

In the same update, the military reported that Russian forces launched 10 rocket attacks, 26 airstrikes and 81 mortar attacks on Ukrainian territory between Friday and Saturday morning. The shelling killed two civilians in Kherson, another province partially occupied by Russia.

Podolyak, the presidential adviser, said Ukraine needs supplies of western long-range missiles “to drastically curtail the Russian army’s key tool” by destroying the warehouses where it stores cannon artillery used on the front lines.