Ukraine and its Western allies are engaged in “fast-track” talks over the possibility of equipping the invaded country with long-range missiles and military aircraft, a top Ukrainian presidential adviser said on Saturday.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Ukraine’s supporters in the West “understand how war plays out” and the need to supply aircraft capable of providing cover for armored fighting vehicles that the United States and Germany originally promised. . Of the month.
However, speaking to the Freedom online video channel, Podolyak said that some of Ukraine’s Western partners maintain a “conservative” attitude towards arms deliveries, “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 need to work with this. We must show (our partners) the real picture of this war,” Podolyak said, without naming specific countries. “We have to speak reasonably and tell them, for example, ‘This and this will reduce deaths, this will reduce the load on the infrastructure. This will reduce threats to the security of the European continent and keep the war localized. And we are doing it.”
The United States and Germany agreed on Wednesday to share advanced tanks with Ukraine along with previously promised Bradley and Marder vehicles, a decision that drew criticism not only from the Kremlin but also from NATO prime minister and European Union member Hungary.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday that Western countries that provide weapons and money to help Ukraine in its war with Russia have “diverted” to become active participants in the conflict. Orban has refused to send weapons to neighboring Ukraine and tried to block EU funds for military aid.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said it would summon the Hungarian ambassador to complain about Orban’s comments. A ministry spokesman, Oleg Nikolenko, said Orban told reporters Ukraine was “no man’s land” and compared it to Afghanistan.
“Such statements are completely unacceptable. Budapest continues its course to deliberately destroy Ukraine-Hungary relations,” Nikolenko said in a Facebook post.
President Joe Biden’s announcement that the United States would send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine reversed months of arguments from Washington that they were too difficult for Ukrainian troops to operate and maintain.
The US decision convinced German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who had raised concerns about a unilateral action drawing Russia’s ire, to agree to send 14 Leopard 2 tanks from Germany’s stocks and to allow European countries with tanks They will send some of their own.
Western weapons have proven essential to Ukraine’s defense and have stoked escalating tensions with Moscow. Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday that Ukrainian forces used US-made HIMARS rockets to attack a hospital in the eastern Ukrainian city of Novoaidar, killing 14 people.
Novoaidar is located in the Lugansk province, which is almost entirely under the control of Russian forces or Russian-backed separatists. The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that the hospital was deliberately targeted. His claim of a strike in Novoaidar could not be immediately verified.
“A deliberate missile attack on a known civilian medical institution in operation is a grave outright war crime of the Kyiv regime,” the ministry said, according to Russian news agencies.
Amid news of Western promises of heavy tanks, Russia bombarded Ukraine with missiles, explosive drones and artillery shells this week. The attacks continued on Saturday, when Russian missiles hit the town of Kostyantynivka in the eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk province.
The missiles struck a residential area, killing three civilians, injuring 14 and damaging four high-rise apartment buildings, a hotel and garages, Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said.
“Kostyantynivka is a city relatively far from the front line, but even so it is constantly under attack from the enemy. Everyone who remains in the city is exposing himself to mortal danger,” Kyrylenko said. “The Russians attack civilians because they can’t fight the Ukrainian army.”
In a separate Telegram post the previous Saturday, Kyrylenko reported that Russian strikes in the province killed four civilians in total and wounded seven others in 24 hours.
Russian rockets struck a residential area in the Donestsk town of Chasiv Yar on Friday night, killing two people and wounding five more, the governor said. Photos attached to Kyrylenko’s post showed a burning three-story school building.
Donetsk province, where the territory is roughly divided between Russian and Ukrainian control, has become the epicenter of the war’s battle as Moscow tries to launch a month-long offensive to capture the city of Bakhmut.
Chasiv Yar stands on a hill strategically placed for the defense of Bakhmut, and has come under heavy Russian shelling. The capture of Bakhmut would allow Russian troops to disrupt Ukrainian supply lines and potentially pave the way for them to threaten Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the largest remaining Ukrainian-held cities in the east of the country.
Russian forces continued ground attacks around Bakhmut and Avdiivka, another Donetsk city to the south, while Ukrainian troops were on the offensive in southern and northeastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian army said in a Saturday morning update. .
The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said that Russian troops “are defending themselves” near Lyman in the Luhansk and Kharkiv oblasts north of Donetsk, as well as in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in the south.
The fighting has largely stalemate in recent months, with winter conditions slowing ground operations and neither side reporting significant progress.
In the same update, the army reported that Russian forces launched 10 missile strikes, 26 airstrikes and 81 shelling strikes on Ukrainian soil between Friday and Saturday morning. The shelling killed two civilians in Kherson, another province partially occupied by Russia.
Podolyak, the presidential adviser, said Ukraine needs supplies of long-range Western missiles “to drastically reduce the Russian military’s key tool” by destroying warehouses where it stores cannon artillery used on the front line.
