UK pledges to send tanks to Ukraine
Russian air attacks against multiple cities start up again
LONDON — U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Saturday promised to provide tanks and artillery systems to Ukraine, amid renewed missile attacks by Moscow targeting multiple Ukrainian cities for the first time in nearly two weeks.
Nine people were killed and 64 others wounded in the southeastern city of Dnipro, where a Russian missile strike destroyed a section of an apartment building, said Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential office.
Infrastructure facilities were also hit in the western Lviv region and IvanoFrankivsk regions, in the Odesa region on the Black Sea and in northeastern Kharkiv. Kyiv, the capital, was also targeted.
Sunak made the pledge to provide Challenger 2 tanks and other artillery systems after speaking to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday, the British leader’s Downing Street office said in a statement.
It didn’t say when the tanks would be delivered or how many. British media have reported that four British Army Challenger 2 main battle tanks will be sent to Eastern Europe immediately, with eight more to follow shortly after, without citing sources.
Zelenskyy tweeted his thanks to Sunak “for the decisions that will not only strengthen us on the battlefield, but also send the right signal to other partners.”
Ukraine has for months sought to be supplied with heavier tanks, including the U.S. Abrams and the
German Leopard 2 tanks, but Western leaders have been treading carefully.
The Czech Republic and Poland have provided Soviet-era T-72 tanks to Ukrainian forces. Poland has also expressed readiness to provide a company of Leopard tanks, but President Andrzej Duda stressed during his recent visit to the Ukrainian city of Lviv that the move would be possible only as an element in a larger international coalition of tank aid to Kyiv.
This month, France said it would send AMX-10 RC armored combat vehicles to Ukraine, designated light tanks in French. The U.S. and Germany also announced they would send Bradley fighting vehicles and Marder armored
personnel carriers, respectively, for the first time.
Sunak’s announcement came as Russian forces fired missiles at Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine in the first major barrage in days.
In Dnipro, rescuers were using a crane to try to evacuate people trapped in the apartment building’s upper stories, some of whom were signaling with the flashlights on their mobile phones, Tymoshenko said on Telegram. He also said there were likely people under the rubble.
In the Kharkiv region, Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said two Russian missiles hit infrastructure Saturday afternoon after a similar attack in the morning.
Another infrastructure facility was hit in the western
Lviv region, according to Gov. Maksym Kozytskyi.
Valeri Zaluzhny, a top military commander for Ukraine, said Russia fired 33 cruise missiles overall on Saturday and 21 of them were shot down.
Earlier in the day, explosions also rocked the capital, Kyiv. The blasts occurred before air sirens sounded, which is unusual. It’s likely the explosions came ahead of the warning sirens because the attack was by ballistic missiles, which are faster than cruise missiles or drones.
According to Ukrainian air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat, Russia attacked Kyiv with ballistic missiles flying from the north.
“The ballistics are not easy for us to detect and shoot down,” he told local media. The warning about the missile threat was late because of the lack of radar data and information from other sources.
An infrastructure target was hit in the morning missile attack, according to Ukrainian officials.
Explosions were heard in the Dniprovskyi district, a residential area on the left bank of the Dnieper River, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Klitschko also said that fragments of a missile fell on a nonresidential area in the Holosiivskyi district on the right bank, and a fire briefly broke out in a building there. No casualties have been reported so far.
It was the first attack on Ukraine’s capital since Jan. 1.
On Saturday morning, two Russian missiles hit Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. The strikes with S-300 missiles targeted “energy and industrial objects of Kharkiv and the (outlying) region,” Syniehubov said.
The attacks follow conflicting reports on the fate of the fiercely contested salt mining town of Soledar, in Ukraine’s embattled east. Russia claims that its forces have captured the town, a development that would mark a rare victory for the Kremlin after a series of humiliating setbacks on the battlefield.
Ukrainian deputy defense minister Hanna Malyar said Saturday that the “fierce battles for Soledar are continuing.”