The US will soon announce more than $2.3bn in new security assistance for Ukraine, defense secretary Lloyd Austin said on Tuesday during a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Rustem Umarov, at the Pentagon. Austin said the latest weapons package would include arms such as anti-tank weapons and air defence interceptors, and would allow accelerated procurement of Nasams (a surface-to-air missile system) and Patriot air defence interceptors.
Austin also gave a nod to Ukraine’s aspirations to eventually join Nato, more than two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion. Referring to next week’s Nato summit in Washington, he said, “We will take steps to build a bridge to Nato membership for Ukraine.” He did not elaborate.
Separately, US secretary of state Antony Blinken and the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, on Tuesday discussed Nato members’ intention to bring Ukraine closer to the alliance, state department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said.
A negotiated outcome with Russia, as opposed to an outright Ukrainian military victory, is now seen as the most likely outcome in most European countries, according to a major poll of 15 countries. Support for Ukraine’s cause remains strong across Europe despite battlefield reverses, but European voters increasingly regard arming Ukraine as necessary not to achieve a complete Ukrainian battlefield victory, but instead to strengthen Ukraine’s hand in future negotiations with Russia.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán urged Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Tuesday to consider a ceasefire to accelerate an end to the war with Russia. “A ceasefire connected to a deadline would give a chance to speed up peace talks. I explored this possibility with the president and I am grateful for his honest answers and negotiation,” he said. Zelenskiy, who spoke before Orban, did not respond to those comments. The Ukrainian president has previously said Putin would not stop his military offensive even if his ceasefire demands were met, and US defence secretary Austin has noted that Putin could end the war he had started “today if he chose to do that”. Orbán is an outspoken critic of western aid to Ukraine. His trip to Kyiv came a day after Hungary took over the rotating EU presidency until the end of the year, to the dismay of many other European politicians, given the country’s frequent clashes with Brussels over domestic rule-of-law issues and foreign policy.
Ukraine on Tuesday sentenced a separatist leader, Leonid Pasechnik of the breakaway Luhansk region, to 12 years in prison in absentia for signing a deal with the Kremlin that led to Russia’s 2022 invasion. On 21 February 2022, Pasechnik and the Donetsk separatist leader Denis Pushilin signed a mutual assistance pact with Putin. Two days later, the pair asked Putin for military help and three days later Moscow launched its invasion that has since ravaged Ukraine.
Ukraine’s air force commander, Mykola Oleshchuk, said on Tuesday the military had carried out a “destructive strike” on a Russian ammunition depot in Moscow-occupied Crimea on Monday. “Once again, Ukrainian aircraft ‘destroyed’ by enemy propaganda continue to successfully perform combat missions,” Oleshchuk said on Telegram, referring to a report by Russia’s defence ministry that five Ukrainian military jets had been destroyed on an airfield in the Poltava region.
A court in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don on Tuesday sentenced a 19-year-old man to 12 years in prison for allegedly donating money to Kyiv’s forces. The FSB Security Service said the teen had sent money to help Kyiv’s army buy drones and food for troops, the RIA Novosti news agency reported. It said the defendant was arrested at an airport as he tried to leave Russia.
In St Petersburg, activist and documentary film-maker Vsevolod Korolev had his sentence more than doubled to seven years after both and he prosecutors appealed against his original jail term of three years for criticising the Ukraine offensive on social media. Korolev has been in pre-trial detention since July 2022, accused of making “untrue” statements about massacres of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.
Russian attacks on the central Ukrainian city of Nikopol killed two women aged 61 and 86 on Tuesday and wounded nine other people, the regional governor said. Governor Serhiy Lysak said on the Telegram messenger that the attacks damaged residential housing, educational facilities and a clinic in the city that lies across the Dnipro River from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
