Ukraine and its Western allies are engaged in “fast-track” talks on the possibility of supplying the stricken country with long-range missiles and military aircraft, an aide to Ukraine’s president said on Saturday.
Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Ukraine’s supporters in the West “understand how the war is developing” and the need to supply aircraft that can provide cover for the armored fighting vehicles promised by the United States and Germany at the beginning. of the month.
However, in the comments of the online video channel Freedom, Podoliak said that some Western partners of Ukraine maintain a “conservative” attitude to the delivery of weapons, “due to fear of changes in the international architecture.” Russia and North Korea have accused the West of prolonging and taking a direct role in the war by sending Kyiv increasingly sophisticated weapons.
“We have to work on this. We have to show (our partners) the real picture of this war,” Podolyak said, without naming specific countries. “We have to speak reasonably and tell, for example, ‘This and this will reduce casualties, this will reduce the burden on infrastructure. This will reduce security threats to the European continent, this will keep local wars at bay.’ And we did,”
The US and Germany agreed Wednesday to share advanced tanks with Ukraine along with previously promised Bradley and Marder vehicles, a decision that led to criticism not only from the Kremlin but from the prime minister of NATO and EU member Hungary.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban insisted on Friday that Western countries that provide weapons and money to help Ukraine in its war with Russia have “drifted” to become active participants in the conflict. Orban refuses to send weapons to neighboring Ukraine and seeks to block EU funding for military aid.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said it would summon the Hungarian ambassador to complain about Orban’s remarks. The ministry’s spokesman, Oleg Nikolenko, said Orban told reporters that Ukraine was a “no man’s land” and compared it to Afghanistan.
“These statements are absolutely unacceptable. Budapest continues to deliberately damage Ukrainian-Hungarian relations,” Nikolenko said in a Facebook post.
President Joe Biden’s announcement that the US will send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine reverses months of arguments by Washington that they are too difficult for Ukrainian forces to operate and maintain.
The US decision persuaded German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who had expressed concern about unilateral actions that angered Russia, to agree to send 14 Leopard 2 tanks from Germany’s stock and allow tank-owning European countries to send some tanks.
Amid reports of a coordinated effort, Russia bombarded Ukraine with missiles, exploding drones and artillery shells. The attack continued on Saturday when Russian missiles hit the town of Kostyantynivka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk province.
The missile landed in a residential area, killing three civilians, wounding 14 and destroying four high-rise apartment buildings, a hotel and a garage, Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said.
“Kostyantynivka is a city relatively far from the front line, but it is still constantly under attack by the enemy. Everyone who remains in the city is in danger of mortality,” said Kyrylenko. “Russia targets civilians because they can’t fight Ukrainian army.”
In a separate Telegram post earlier on Saturday, Kyrylenko reported that Russian attacks in the province killed four civilians and wounded seven others in 24 hours.
Russian rockets struck a residential area in the Donestsk city of Chasiv Yar on Friday night, killing two people and wounding five others, the governor said. A photo attached to Kyrylenko’s post shows a burning three-story school building.
Donetsk province, where the region is roughly divided between Russian and Ukrainian control, has been at the center of the war since Moscow tried to jump-start a month-long offensive to retake the city of Bakhmut.
Chasiv Yar is located on a strategic hill for the defense of Bakhmut, and has been subjected to intensive Russian attacks. Capturing Bakhmut would allow Russian forces to disrupt Ukraine’s supply lines and potentially open the way to threatening Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the largest city still under Ukrainian control in the east of the country.
Russian forces continued to attack around Bakhmut and Avdiivka, another Donetsk city in the south, while Ukrainian forces attacked in the south and northeast of Ukraine, the Ukrainian military said in an update Saturday morning.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said Russian troops were “self-defending” near Lyman in Luhansk and Kharkiv provinces north of Donetsk, as well as in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces in the south.
The fighting has been largely stalemated for the past several months, with winter conditions worsening and neither side reporting significant progress.
In the same update, the military reported that Russian forces launched 10 missile strikes, 26 airstrikes and 81 bullet strikes on Ukrainian territory between Friday and Saturday morning. The attack killed two civilians in Kherson, another province partially controlled by Russia.
Podoliak, the president’s adviser, said Ukraine needed Western supplies of long-range missiles “to drastically reduce the Russian army’s key tool” by destroying warehouses that store artillery pieces used on the front lines.