A senior Pentagon official said new $400 million in US military aid to Ukraine, which includes four Himars multiple rocket launcher systems and 155mm howitzers, will improve the Ukrainian military’s ability to target weapons caches and supply lines of the Russians.
After four and a half months war in Ukraine the Russian army continues the “non-stop” shelling of Donetskwhile the US pledged yesterday Friday to offer new military aid to Kyiv.
“The entire front line is bombarded incessantly“, the governor of Donetsk said last night Pavlos Kirilenko. “They don’t stop bombing Donetsk (…) Bakhmut is being bombarded, Sloviansk, Kramatorsk are being bombarded day and night…“, he wrote on Telegram.
Earlier yesterday Kirilenko stated that six people were killed and 21 injured in the last 24 hours since the bombings in the area.
According to him, the Russian army “he has begun to regroup or rather to reshape his groups and is preparing for new actions in Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and Bakhmut.”
In his area KharkivUkraine’s second-largest city, four people were killed and nine wounded in the past 24 hours, the governor said Oleg Sinegubov.
In the meantime, the vice president of the Ukrainian government Irina Vereshchuk called the civilians who are in its areas Chersona and Zaporizhiawhich have been occupied by the Russians, to move away.
“Please, leave. Our army will begin the recapture of these areas. Our determination is absolute, And it will be difficult to open humanitarian corridors later“, emphasized Vereshchuk.
For his part, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday he visited areas on and near the front, as well as a hospital in Dnipro where wounded soldiers are being treated. He also toured the defense lines in Dnipropetrovsk and Kryvyi Rih.
A senior Pentagon official also said the new $400m in US military aid to Ukraine – which includes four Himars multiple rocket launcher systems and 155mm howitzers – will improve the Ukrainian military’s ability to target weapons caches and Russian supply lines.
In total, Washington has so far provided $6.9 billion in military aid to Kyiv since the beginning of the Russian invasion.
“Crop Destruction”
Bombing the Donetsk region, Moscow is trying to occupy the entire Donbass valleywhich is its strategic goal.
According to the regional governor, the Russian army has begun to set the crops on fire: “There are huge fires in the fields which the enemy deliberately causes. They try to destroy the crops by any means. They bomb agricultural machinery, harvesters“, he complained.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a country considered the world’s breadbasket, has caused food prices to skyrocket and contributed to rising inflation worldwide.
Yesterday the foreign ministers of the Group of 20 (G20) meeting in Indonesia “expressed their deep concern about the humanitarian impact of the war” in Ukraine, as stated by the head of Indonesian diplomacy, Retno Marsudi.
The effects of the war “are felt worldwide in food, energy and budgets”, he underlined. “And as always poor and developing countries are hit hardest.”
Although the G20 did not unanimously condemn the Russian invasion, Westerners appreciated that they managed to widen the front against Russia and clearly lay on it the responsibility for the war and the food and energy crisis it caused.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov walked out mid-day from the meeting, which was also attended by his US counterpart Anthony Blinken.
It was the first time since the start of the war in February that the two men had met in the same meeting, but Blinken refused to meet separately with Lavrov. The Russian minister replied that Moscow is not running behind Washington asking for talks.
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