Ukraine and its Western allies are engaged in “fast-track” talks on the potential for equipping the invaded country with long-range missiles and military aircraft, a top Ukrainian presidential aide said Saturday.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Ukraine’s supporters within the West “understand how the war is developing” and the necessity to provide planes able to providing cover for the armored fighting vehicles that the USA and Germany pledged at first of the month.
Nevertheless, in remarks to the web video channel Freedom, Podolyak said that a few of Ukraine’s Western partners maintain a “conservative” attitude to arms deliveries, “attributable to fear of changes within the international architecture.” Russia and North Korea have accused the West of prolonging and taking a direct role within the war by sending Kyiv increasingly sophisticated weapons.
“We’d like to work with this. We must show (our partners) the true picture of this war,” Podolyak said, without naming specific countries. “We must speak reasonably and tell them, for instance, ‘This and this can reduce fatalities, this can reduce the burden on infrastructure. It will reduce security threats to the European continent, this can keep the war localized.’ And we’re doing it,”
The U.S. and Germany agreed Wednesday to share advanced tanks with Ukraine together with the Bradley and Marder vehicles promised earlier, a choice that led to criticism not only from the Kremlin but from the prime minister of NATO and European Union member Hungary.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban asserted Friday that Western countries providing weapons and money to help Ukraine in its war with Russia have “drifted” into becoming energetic participants within the conflict. Orban has refused to send weapons to neighboring Ukraine and sought to dam EU funds earmarked for military aid.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said it will summon Hungary’s ambassador to complain about Orban’s remarks. A ministry spokesperson, Oleg Nikolenko, said Orban told reporters that Ukraine was “a no man’s land” and compared it to Afghanistan.
“Such statements are completely unacceptable. Budapest continues on its course to deliberately destroy Ukrainian-Hungarian relations,” Nikolenko said in a Facebook post.
President Joe Biden’s announcement that the U.S. would send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine reversed months of arguments by Washington that they were too difficult for Ukrainian troops to operate and maintain.
The U.S. decision persuaded German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who had expressed concern a couple of unilateral motion drawing Russia’s wrath, to conform to send 14 Leopard 2 tanks from Germany’s stocks and to permit European countries with tanks to send a few of theirs.
Amid news of the coordinated effort, Russia bombarded Ukraine with missiles, exploding drones and artillery shells. The attacks continued Saturday when Russian missiles struck town of Kostyantynivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk province.
The missiles fell in a residential area, killing three civilians, wounding 14 and damaging 4 high-rise apartment buildings, a hotel and garages, Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said.
“Kostyantynivka is a city relatively removed from the front line, but still, it continuously suffers from enemy attacks. Everyone who stays in town exposes themselves to mortal danger,” Kyrylenko said. “The Russians goal civilians because they should not capable of fight the Ukrainian army.”
In a separate Telegram post earlier Saturday, Kyrylenko reported that Russian attacks within the province killed 4 civilians in all and wounded seven others in 24 hours.
Russian rockets hit a residential area the Donestsk town of Chasiv Yar on Friday night, killing of two people and wounding five more, the governor said. Photos attached to Kyrylenko’s post showed a three-story school constructing on fire.
Donetsk province, where the territory is roughly split between Russian and Ukrainian control, has change into the battle epicenter of the war as Moscow tries to jump-start a monthslong, grinding offensive to capture town of Bakhmut.
Chasiv Yar lies on a hill strategically situated for the defense of Bakhmut, and has come under intensified Russian shelling. Capturing Bakhmut would allow Russian troops to disrupt Ukrainian supply lines and potentially pave the way in which for them to threaten Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the most important remaining Ukrainian-held cities within the country’s east.
Russian forces continued ground attacks around Bakhmut and Avdiivka, one other Donetsk city to the south, while Ukrainian troops were on the offensive in southern and northeast Ukraine, the Ukrainian military said in a Saturday morning update.
The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said that Russian troops “are defending themselves” near Lyman in Luhansk and Kharkiv provinces north of Donetsk, as well in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces within the south.
The fighting has largely been deadlocked over the past months, with winter conditions slowing down ground operations and neither side reporting significant progress.
In the identical update, the military reported that Russian forces launched 10 missile strikes, 26 airstrikes and 81 shelling attacks on Ukrainian territory between Friday and Saturday mornings. The shelling killed two civilians in Kherson, one other province that’s partly Russian-occupied.
Podolyak, the presidential adviser, said Ukraine needs supplies of Western long-range missiles “to drastically curtail the important thing tool of the Russian army” by destroying the warehouses where it stores cannon artillery used on the front line.