Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has attended the meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels, appearing before the media in a joint briefing with the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg.
Zelenskiy said he expected Russia to use winter as a weapon and again target Ukraine’s energy infrastructre, and he asked for increased air defence. He appealed again for confiscated Russian assets to be released to pay for reconstruction in Ukraine.
Stoltenberg said that Nato would continue to support Ukraine, because “your fight is our fight”. He said support for Ukraine from Nato would be “about air defence. It’s about artillery, it’s about ammunition”. He added that Nato had increased production of armaments
The US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, said on Wednesday America would continue to support Ukraine for as long as it took, even amid the unfolding political chaos in Congress and despite the escalating violence in the Middle East. “We’re here to dig deep to meet Ukraine’s most urgent needs – especially for air defence and ammunition,” he said.
Russia’s foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin has said the issue of support for Ukraine was becoming toxic in the US and that the divisions would deepen ahead of next year’s presidential election.
Repairing the damaged Balticconnector pipeline between Finland and Estonia will take at least five months, and a restart of gas transport will at the earliest happen in April 2024, the operators have said. On Tuesday Finnish officials said that extensive damage to the undersea gas pipeline and a communications cable “could not have occurred by accident”.
Stoltenberg said on Wednesday of the pipeline damage that “if it is proven to be a deliberate attack on a Nato critical infrastructure, then this will be of course serious, but it will also be met by a united and determined that response from Nato”.
Ukraine’s security service on Wednesday said it had identified two suspected informers who allegedly helped Russia strike at a wake in Hroza, Kharkiv region last week, killing more than 50 people.
Belgium will send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine from 2025, its defence minister, Ludivine Dedonder, said on Bel RTL radio.
The US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, on Wednesday said a G7-led price cap on Russian oil had sharply reduced Russian revenues over the past 10 months, and that it was critical to keep imposing severe and increasing costs on Russia over its war in Ukraine.
Alexander Bogomaz, the Bryansk regional governor, said Russia had shot down at least three Ukrainian drones over his region in the past few hours.
The Netherland’s defence secretary, Kajsa Ollongren, has said outside the Nato headquarters in Brussels that Sweden should be admitted into the alliance as swiftly as possible. She said: “I’ve also talked about this issue to my Turkish colleague. I think it is vital for the strength of Nato, especially in north-eastern part of Nato. And I really hope that Turkey as soon as possible will take the right decision.” Turkey and Hungary remain the only two members of the alliance yet to ratify Sweden joining.
Rights activist Oleg Orlov told a Moscow court on Wednesday that Russia had descended into a totalitarian state resembling George Orwell’s 1984 as he asked a judge to acquit him of discrediting the armed forces by condemning the war in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin will visit Kyrgyzstan on Thursday, the presidential office of the central Asian country said, in what would be the Russian leader’s first known trip abroad since the international criminal court issued a warrant for his arrest.
Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said on Tuesday Zelenskiy had promised him that Ukraine would not attack Europe’s biggest nuclear plant as part of its counteroffensive against Russia. In an interview with the Guardian, the nuclear watchdog chief said he was most concerned about the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant becoming engulfed in fighting between the two sides, but insisted he had obtained a commitment from the Ukrainian president.
Russia was defeated in its bid to return to the UN’s human rights council, with Albania and Bulgaria winning more votes at the general assembly, which voted last year to suspend Moscow after its invasion of Ukraine.
Russian forces are closing in on Avdiivka, which has been hit by intense shelling since Tuesday morning, officials said. The eastern Ukrainian town is symbolically and strategically important to Kyiv, lying just north of the Moscow-controlled city of Donetsk that was seized by separatist forces in 2014.
