Nato allies pledge more help for Ukraine
Promise comes amid intense Russian push
Nato allies promised more arms for Ukraine and equipment to help restore power supplies cut by Russian strikes, as President Volodymyr Zelensky said his forces were defending against attempted Russian advances in multiple regions.
Ukraine’s General Staff said yesterday its forces had repelled six Russian attacks in the past 24 hours in the eastern Donbas region, while Russian artillery had relentlessly shelled the right bank of the Dnipro River and Kherson city further south.
Ukrainians on Tuesday fled for bomb shelters after air-raid warning sirens, although the all-clear later sounded across the country. In the eastern Donetsk region Russian forces pounded Ukrainian targets with artillery, mortar and tank fire.
Mr Zelensky said the Russian military was also attacking in Lugansk in the east and Kharkiv in the northeast, the latter an area Ukraine recaptured in September.
“The situation at the front is difficult,” Mr Zelensky said in his nightly video address. “Despite extremely large losses, the occupiers are still trying to advance” in Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkiv. And “they are planning something in the south,” he said.
Ukraine regained control of Kherson in the south this month after Russian forces retreated. Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield reports.
Foreign ministers from the Nato alliance, including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, began a two-day meeting in Bucharest on Tuesday, seeking ways both to keep Ukrainians safe and warm and to sustain Kyiv’s military through a coming winter campaign.
“We need air defence, IRIS, Hawks, Patriots, and we need transformers [for our energy needs],” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told reporters on the sidelines of the Nato meeting, enumerating various Western air defence systems.
“In a nutshell: Patriots and transformers are what Ukraine needs the most.”
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev warned Nato against providing Ukraine with Patriot missile defence systems and denounced the Atlantic alliance as a “criminal entity” for delivering arms to what he called “Ukrainian fanatics”.
Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Russian President Vladimir Putin was “trying to use winter as a weapon of war” as Moscow’s forces lose ground on the battlefield.
US and European officials said ministers would focus in their talks on nonlethal aid such as fuel, medical supplies and winter equipment, as well as on military assistance. Washington said it would provide US$53 million (1.8 billion baht) to buy power grid equipment.
US President Joe Biden said providing more military assistance for Ukraine was a priority, but Republicans, who take control of Congress’ House of Representatives in January, have talked about pausing the funding, which has surpassed $18 billion.
Russia has launched huge attacks on Ukraine’s electricity transmission and heating infrastructure since October, in what Kyiv and its allies say is a deliberate campaign to harm civilians, a war crime.
In Kyiv, snow fell and temperatures were hovering around freezing as millions in and around the capital struggled to heat their homes.
An official with the power company said on Facebook that 985,500 customers in Kyiv were without power, and another electricity provider said the city was set to have emergency power cuts yesterday.
In a brief posting on Telegram, Kherson region governor Yaroslav Yanushevych said on Tuesday electricity had been restored to half of the city of Kherson.
Ukrainian forces struck a power plant in Russia’s Kursk region on Tuesday, causing some electricity outages, Roman Starovoyt, the governor of the region, said on the Telegram messaging app.
Early yesterday a large oil storage tank was on fire in Russia’s Bryansk region bordering Ukraine’s northeast, a local governor said.
There were no reported casualties, he added, without commenting on the cause of the blaze.