Prez: Ukraine faces ‘extremely difficult’ frontline battles
Ukrainian troops, reeling from the loss of a key town, now face “extremely difficult” conditions all along the frontline with Russia because of delayed foreign aid, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
A heightened Russian offensive in eastern and southern Ukraine saw them capture the key town of Avdiivka last week in a major boost ahead of the second anniversary of the February 2022 invasion.
The Ukrainian military also says it is critically short of ammunition and shells, worsened by the holdup of a $60 billion US aid package.
“The situation is extremely difficult in several parts of the frontline, where Russian troops have concentrated maximum reserves,” Zelensky said on Monday after visiting frontline troops in the Kharkiv region.
Russian troops “are taking advantage of the delays in helping Ukraine,” Zelensky added, highlighting shortages of artillery, frontline air defence and longer-range weapons.
US President Joe Biden told Zelensky on Sunday that he was “confident” the Republicandominated
US Congress would approve the critically needed aid.
Slain defector was ‘moral corpse’: Russia’s spy chief
Russia’s spy boss on Tuesday said a pilot who defected to Ukraine with a military helicopter and then reportedly shot dead in Spain was a “moral corpse”.
Maxim Kuzminov flew his Mi-8 helicopter into Ukraine in August in a brazen operation, saying he opposed Russia’s military offensive.
Reports in Spanish media said Kuzminov was found shot dead in the southern town of Villajoyosa last week, where he had moved after receiving Ukrainian citizenship for switching sides.
A spokesperson for Ukraine’s main intelligence directorate later confirmed that Kuzminov had died without providing further details, Ukrainian media reported.
“This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse at the very moment when he planned his dirty and terrible crime,” Russian state news agencies quoted Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, as saying on Tuesday.
Australia on Tuesday outlined a decade-long plan to double its fleet of major warships and boost defence spending by an additional A$11.1 billion ($7.25 billion), in the face of a quickening Asia-Pacific arms race.
Under the plan, Australia will get a navy of 26 major surface combatant ships, up from 11 today. “It is the largest fleet that we will have since the end of the Second World War,” said defence minister Richard Marles.
The announcement comes after a massive build-up of firepower by rivals China and Russia, and amid growing confrontation between nervous US-led allies and increasingly bellicose authoritarian governments.
Australia will get six Hunter class frigates, 11 general-purpose frigates, three air warfare destroyers and six state-of-theart surface warships that do not need to be crewed.
At least some of the fleet will be armed with Tomahawk missiles capable of long-range strikes on targets deep inside enemy territory — a major deterrent capability.
The plan would see Australia increase its defence spending to 2.4% of gross domestic product, above the two percent target set by its Nato allies.
Some of the ships will be built in Adelaide, ensuring more than 3,000 jobs, but others will be sourced from US designs and a still undecided design to come from Spain, Germany, South Korea or Japan.
In 2021, Australia announced plans to buy at least three US-designed nuclear-powered submarines, scrapping a yearslong plan to develop non-nuclear subs from France that had already cost billions of dollars.
While the Virginia-class submarines will be nuclear-powered, they will not be armed with atomic weapons and are instead expected to carry longrange cruise missiles. They represent a step-shift for the country’s open water capabilities.
Experts say that taken together, Australia is poised to develop significant naval capability. But the country’s major defence projects have long been beset by cost overruns, government U-turns, policy changes and project plans that make more sense for local job creation than defence.
Michael Shoebridge, a former senior security official and now independent analyst, said the government must overcome past errors and had “no more time to waste” as competition in the region heats up.
Shoebridge said there must be a trimmed-down procurement process, otherwise, it will be a “familiar path that leads to delays, construction troubles, cost blowouts — and at the end, ships that get into service too late with systems that are overtaken by events and technological change”.
Wooing specific electorates with the promise of “continuous naval shipbuilding” cannot be the priority, he said. “This will just get in the way of the actual priority: reversing the collapse of our Navy’s fleet.”