US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday said that US military aid on its way to Ukraine would make a “real difference” on the battlefield, as the top diplomat made an unannounced visit to reassure an ally facing a fierce new Russian offensive.
In increasingly intense attacks along the northeastern border in recent days, Moscow’s troops have captured about 100 to 125km2 of territory that includes at least seven villages, open source monitoring analysts said. Although most of those villages were already depopulated, thousands of civilians in the area have fled the fighting.
Analysts have called this moment one of the most dangerous for Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 — and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy yesterday asked for more air defense systems, including two Patriot air defense systems, to protect civilians under Russian fire in the northeast.
Photo: AFP
“We know this is a challenging time,” Blinken said in the Ukrainian capital, where he met with Zelenskiy, but added that US military aid is “going to make a real difference against the ongoing Russian aggression on the battlefield.”
The visit comes less than a month after the US Congress approved a long-delayed foreign assistance package that sets aside US$60 billion in aid for Ukraine, much of which would go toward replenishing badly depleted artillery and air defense systems.
Some of that “is now on the way,” Blinken said, and some has already arrived in Ukraine.
Moscow’s renewed offensive in the northeastern region of Kharkiv is the most significant border incursion since the early days of the war — and comes after months when the roughly 1,000km front line barely budged.
More than 7,500 civilians have been evacuated from the area, authorities said.
Russian forces are also expanding their push to the northern border regions of Sumy and Chernihiv, and Kyiv’s outgunned and outnumbered soldiers are struggling to hold them back, Ukrainian officials said.
Artillery, air defense interceptors and long-range ballistic missiles have already been delivered, some of them already to the front lines, said a senior US official traveling with Blinken on an overnight train from Poland who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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