Russia launches a new wave of attacks
Biden seeks massive aid package
DNIPRO, Ukraine — Ending days of relative calm in the Ukrainian capital, Russia on Thursday bombarded Kyiv — even as the head of the United Nations visited and met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — while also ramping up attacks along the besieged country’s eastern front, Ukrainian officials said.
The attacks came as President Joe Biden announced he was seeking $33 billion in additional military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine and also sought congressional approval to seize the assets of Russian oligarchs who support Russian President Vladimir Putin and use the funds to help Ukraine.
“The cost of this fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is more costly,” Biden said in announcing the new package to be spent over the next five months.
Thursday’s missile attacks on Kyiv hit an apartment building, injuring several people and killing at least one, city officials said. The explosions came as U.N. Secretary-general António Guterres was winding up a day of meetings in the capital with Zelenskyy and others to discuss the evacuation of civilians from the nearly obliterated southern port city of Mariupol, among other issues.
Guterres and his team were uninjured, the U.N. said. He also inspected the sites of suspected atrocities committed by Russian forces and denounced the “evil” of the Kremlin-ordered invasion.
“I must say what I feel,” Guterres said as he toured the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Borodyanka, occupied by Russian forces that left behind destruction and death when they eventually retreated. “I imagined my family in one of those houses that is now destroyed and black. I see my granddaughters running away in panic, part of the family eventually killed.
“So, the war is an absurdity
in the 21st century,” Guterres said. “The war is evil.”
His visit to the Ukrainian capital came two days after meeting with Putin in Moscow and reaching an agreement “in principle” on evacuations for civilians trapped in a vast steel plant in Mariupol. Ukraine has not confirmed any new evacuations from the city, which Russia has otherwise largely overtaken.
As the war raged on Thursday, Ukraine said it intercepted attacks along a 300-mile battlefront skirting the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, while Russia’s Defense Ministry made unverified claims that it had struck overnight at military targets in Barvinkove and Ivanivka, settlements in the Kharkiv region, which has been the site of near-constant shelling over more than two months of war.
In the region, known as the Donbas, Russian forces are making “slow and uneven”
but “incremental” progress, a senior U.S. Defense Department official said Thursday.
“There has been continued pushback by the Ukrainians since, so there’s a lot of, still, back-and-forth in the Donbas in terms of territory gained and/or lost by, frankly, both sides,” the official said, briefing reporters in Washington on condition of anonymity.
The growing Russian assaults, now shifted away from Kyiv as Moscow tries to secure a large area across southern and eastern Ukraine, came as hostilities reached new levels not only on the battlefield but also diplomatically.
Russia, under economic sanctions by dozens of nations and facing a U.s.-led partnership of more than 40 countries that vowed this week to increase arms supplies to Ukraine, has suggested it may cut off gas exports to more states after suspending shipments to Poland and Bulgaria on Wednesday.