Madrid/Kyiv: Russia on Thursday stepped up its offensive in eastern Ukraine after NATO described Moscow as the biggest “direct threat” to Western security and agreed to a plan to modernize Kyiv’s beleaguered armed forces.
Ukrainian officials said they were trying to evacuate residents from the eastern city of Lisichansk, the epicenter of Russia’s attacks, where some 15,000 people were under constant shelling.
“The fighting is going on all the time. The Russians are constantly on the offensive. There is no let-up,” regional governor Serhi Gaidai told Ukrainian television.
“Absolutely everything is being shelled.”
Ukrainian emergency service personnel help an injured local resident after Russian shelling in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, June 29, 2022. (AP photo/George Ivanchenko)
In the southern Kherson region, Ukrainian forces were fighting back with artillery attacks of their own, Oleshsky Erestovich, adviser to the Ukrainian president, said in a video posted online.
On Wednesday, in a summit dominated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the geopolitical turmoil it caused, NATO invited Sweden and Finland to join and combat forces on high alert along its eastern side in 2023. Promised a seven-fold increase from Rs.
In response, President Vladimir Putin said Russia would respond in kind if NATO established infrastructure in Finland and Sweden after joining the US-led military alliance.
Russian news agencies quoted Putin as saying he could not rule out that joining NATO would strain Moscow’s ties with Helsinki and Stockholm.
US President Joe Biden announced the deployment of more land, sea and air forces across Europe, from Spain in the west to Romania and Poland bordering Ukraine.
These included a Permanent Army Headquarters with a battalion in Poland – the first full-time US deployment to NATO’s eastern edge.
“President Putin’s war against Ukraine has disturbed the peace in Europe and created the biggest security crisis in Europe since World War II,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told a news conference.
“NATO has responded with strength and unity,” he said.
Britain said it would provide another 1 billion pounds ($1.2 billion) in military aid to Ukraine, including air defense systems, unmanned aerial vehicles and new electronic warfare equipment.
‘Fight everywhere’
As 30 national NATO leaders were meeting in Madrid, Russian forces intensified attacks in Ukraine, including missile strikes and shelling on the front lines in the southern Mykolaiv region and the Black Sea.
The mayor of the city of Mykolaiv said a Russian missile had killed at least five people in a residential building there, while Moscow said its forces had called the area a training base for foreign mercenaries.
Fighting continued around the hilltop town of Lisichansk, which Russian forces are trying to surround as separatist proxies try to capture the industrialized eastern Donbass region. Donbass includes Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.
A video clip broadcast on Russia’s RIA state news agency shows former US soldier Alexander Drucke, who was captured fighting for the Ukrainian army.
“My combat experience here was that there was a mission that day,” said Drucke, of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, referring to the day he was caught outside Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. “I didn’t shoot. I expect that to be a factor in whatever sentence I get or don’t get.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky once again told NATO that the Ukrainian military needed more weapons and money, and increasingly, to destroy Russia’s vast advance in artillery and missile firepower, adding that Moscow’s ambitions were not in Ukraine. Wait.
The Russian offensive, which began on February 24, devastated cities, killed thousands and sent millions of people fleeing. Russia says it is conducting a “special military operation” to rid Ukraine of dangerous nationalists. Ukraine and the West accuse Russia of unprovoked, imperialist-style land grabs.
Top US intelligence official Avril Haines said on Wednesday that the near future is most likely a grinding conflict in which Moscow makes only incremental gains but sees no breakthrough on its goal of taking over much of Ukraine.
,complete solidarity,
Pointing to a sharp deterioration in relations with Russia since the invasion, a NATO communique called Russia “the most significant and direct threat to the security of the allies”, having previously classified it as a “strategic partner”. .
NATO issued a new strategic concept document, the first since 2010, which states that “a strong independent Ukraine is vital to the stability of the Euro-Atlantic region.”
To that end, NATO agreed a long-term financial and military aid package to modernize Ukraine’s largely Soviet-era military.
“We stand in complete solidarity with the government and the people of Ukraine in the heroic defense of our country,” the release said.
Stoltenberg said NATO has agreed to put 300,000 troops on high readiness by 2023 under a new force model to defend the region stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, up from 40,000 now.
NATO’s invitation to Sweden and Finland to join the alliance is one of the most significant changes in European security in decades as Helsinki and Stockholm abandon the tradition of neutrality in response to an invasion of Russia.