Russian drones and S-300 missiles attacked Ukraine over Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, Ukraine’s air force said. All 10 drones were shot down, said the air force. It did not say whether the missiles reached their targets.
A day earlier, Ukrainian forces shot down a Russian Su-34 fighter jet on the eastern front, air force commander Mykola Oleshchuk said.
Ukraine’s troops withdrew from the villages of Severne and Stepove near the eastern town of Avdiika, recently captured by Russian forces, military spokesperson Dmytro Lykhoviy said. The general staff said Ukrainian forces undertook airstrikes on Russian positions in the settlement of Krasnohorivka near Avdiivka.
Around Avdiikva, recently captured by Russian invasion troops, heavy fighting was reported on the eastern side of Orlivka and just north of Tonen’ke; while east of Semenivka, Ukrainian troops were using mines and artillery against advancing Russian armour. In the Zaporizhzhia oblast, Ukrainian forces reportedly fought off assaults around Malynivka and Robotyne.
Ukraine is expected to remain short of ammunition and on the back foot in its war with Russia for several months until the west sorts out further support, Adm Sir Tony Radakin, the head of Britain’s armed forces, has said.
The US president, Joe Biden, met congressional leaders in the White House on Tuesday for talks on the Ukraine aid bill, in a meeting described by the Democrats’ Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, as intense. Biden said of Ukraine aid: “The need is urgent … the consequences of inaction every day in Ukraine are dire.”
Mike Johnson – the Republican speaker of the House, who has been blocking further consideration of Ukraine aid, did not mention the topic in brief remarks outside the West Wing afterwards. He talked about security of the Mexico border and continued funding of the government, as well as a one-on-one with Biden. Republican hardliners have presented themselves as being focused on securing the border from illegal immigrants ahead of further help for Ukraine, despite having negotiated and then rejected legislation that deals with both.
Several European countries and the US said they were not considering sending ground troops to Ukraine after France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, refused to rule it out. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, went so far as to say there was agreement at the Paris Ukraine conference on Monday “that there will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil” sent by European states or Nato states.
The French foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, in an address to the French parliament, said: “We must consider new actions to support Ukraine. These must respond to very specific needs, I am thinking in particular of mine clearance, cyber, the production of weapons on site, on Ukrainian territory. Some of these actions could require a presence on Ukrainian territory, without crossing the threshold of belligerence. Nothing should be excluded. This was and still is the position today of the president of the republic.”
France’s prime minister, Gabriel Attal, also said nothing was off the table in western efforts to prevent a Russian victory in Ukraine. “No dynamic can be ruled out. We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war,” he said. The Kremlin suggested that conflict between Russia and Nato would become inevitable if European members of Nato fought in Ukraine.
Janet Yellen, the US secretary of the treasury, has called for G7 countries to urgently seize profits from Russian assets frozen in the west and redirect them to Ukraine. “There is a strong international law, economic, and moral case for moving forward. This would be a decisive response to Russia’s unprecedented threat to global stability.”
Two police officers were killed and four were injured by Russian shelling in the northern Ukrainian region of Sumy, Ukraine’s interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, said. Klymenko wrote on Telegram that an investigative team was deliberately fired upon while documenting damage caused by an earlier Russian strike.
North Korea has shipped about 6,700 containers carrying millions of munitions to Russia since July to support Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, South Korean media reported on Tuesday. South Korea’s defence minister, Shin Won-sik, said the containers might carry more than 3 million 152mm artillery shells, or 500,000 122mm rounds.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president, arrived in Albania on Tuesday ahead of the “Ukraine-Southeast Europe Summit” on security. Albania’s foreign minister, Igli Hasani, said Albania was “standing in solidarity with Ukraine in its heroic fight against Russia’s aggression”. Albania, a Nato member since 2009, has been a vocal supporter of Ukraine but has been quieter in public about supplying it with arms.
