A fresh barrage of Russian missiles rained down on Ukrainian cities on Tuesday while NATO declared it would go ahead with its annual routine nuclear deterrent exercises.
Key points:
It came a day after widespread strikes killed at least 19 people in what the United Nations human rights office described as a “particularly shocking” attack that could amount to war crimes.
Air raid warnings extended throughout the country in the morning, sending some residents back into shelters after months of relative calm in Kyiv and other cities.
The earlier lull had led many Ukrainians to ignore the regular sirens, but Monday’s attacks in the capital and 12 other regions gave them new urgency.
“It brings anger, not fear,” Kyiv resident Volodymyr Vasylenko, 67, said as crews worked to restore traffic lights and clear debris from the city’s streets.
“We already got used to this. And we will keep fighting.”
The Kremlin on Tuesday said that the continuation of US military support to Ukraine would serve only to extend the conflict.
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked questions during a conference call with reporters about US President Joe Biden telling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Washington had agreed to provide advanced air defence systems.
“It will only drag the conflict out and make it more painful for the Ukrainian side, but it will not change our goals and the end result,” Mr Peskov said.
Zelenskyy asks G7 for ‘an air shield’
Mr Zelenskyy addressed the leaders of the Group of Seven (G-7) industrial powers by videoconference on Tuesday, thanking them for their support and pleading for more help.
Mr Zelenskyy asked leaders to “help financially with the creation of an air shield for Ukraine”.
“When Ukraine receives a sufficient quantity of modern and effective air defence systems, the key element of Russia’s terror, rocket strikes, will cease to work,” Mr Zelenskyy said.
He also suggested an international mission be set up to observe activity on the Ukrainian-Belarusian border, saying that Russia was “trying to directly draw Belarus into this war”.
“Indirectly it has already involved them. And now it wants to involve them directly,” he said.
“Ukraine did not plan and does not plan military actions against Belarus. We are only interested in restoring our territorial integrity.”
Mr Zelenskyy also called for G-7 countries — the United States, Germany, France, Japan, Britain, Italy and Canada — to back a tough cap on Russian oil and gas exports, and he again ruled out talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“A tough price cap is needed for the exports of oil and gas from Russia – zero profit for the terrorist state,” he said on Telegram after the meeting.
Following the virtual conference, the G-7 leaders pledged in a statement that they “will stand firmly with Ukraine for as long as it takes.”
They said they will continue to provide financial, humanitarian, military, diplomatic and legal support to Kyiv, and that they are committed to supporting Ukraine in meeting its “winter preparedness needs.”
Germany, which currently chairs the G-7, announced the meeting after Monday’s simultaneous strikes across Ukraine.
The bombardment on Tuesday struck both power plants and civilian areas, just as Monday’s attacks did, and residents were urged to remain in bomb shelters.
Mr Zelenskyy said they were deliberately timed to kill people and knock out Ukraine’s power grid.
His prime minister said 11 major infrastructure targets were hit in eight regions, leaving parts of the country with no electricity, water or heat.
“They are trying to destroy us and wipe us off the face of the earth,” Mr Zelenskyy said.
Mr Zelenskyy said the strikes targeted energy infrastructure and people.
“Such a time and such targets were specially chosen to cause as much damage as possible,” he said in a video message filmed on a mobile phone on an empty central Kyiv street.
Russian forces are ‘exhausted’, UK spy chief says
A person was killed when 12 missiles slammed into public facilities in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, setting off a large fire, the State Emergency Service said.
The State Emergency Service reported that 19 people died and 105 people were wounded in Monday’s strikes.
At least five of the victims were in Kyiv.
More than 300 cities and towns lost power, from the capital to Lviv on the border with Poland.
A spokesperson for the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said that strikes on “civilian objects,” including infrastructure such as power plants, could qualify as a war crime.
“Damage to key power stations and lines ahead of the upcoming winter raises further concerns for the protection of civilians and in particular the impact on vulnerable populations,” Ravina Shamdasani said at a UN briefing in Geneva.
“Attacks targeting civilians and objects indispensable to the survival of civilians are prohibited under international humanitarian law.”
The head of Britain’s cyber-intelligence agency GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, said on Tuesday in a rare public speech that Russia was running out of military supplies and struggling to fill its ranks.
“Russia’s forces are exhausted,” Mr Fleming said.
“The use of prisoners as reinforcements, and now the mobilisation of tens of thousands of inexperienced conscripts, speaks of a desperate situation.”
‘Russia will be forced to take relevant countermeasures’
In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the 30-nation military alliance would hold long-planned exercises next week to test the state of readiness of its nuclear capabilities.
The exercise dubbed “Steadfast Noon” is held annually.
It involves fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear warheads but does not involve any live bombs.
Conventional jets, and surveillance and refuelling aircraft routinely take part.
Asked whether it was the wrong time for such an exercise, Mr Stoltenberg said, “It would send a very wrong signal now, if we suddenly cancelled a routine, long-time planned exercise because of the war in Ukraine.”
Mr Stoltenberg said Mr Putin’s nuclear rhetoric over the war in Ukraine was “irresponsible” and he said that “Russia knows that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought”.
NATO as an organisation does not possess any nuclear weapons.
They remain under the control of three member countries — the US, UK and France.
Meanwhile, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov warned on Tuesday that Western military assistance to Kyiv, including training Ukrainian soldiers in NATO countries and feeding Ukraine real-time satellite data to target Russian forces, had “increasingly drawn Western nations into the conflict on the part of the Kyiv regime”.
State RIA-Novosti news agency reported that Mr Ryabkov said, “Russia will be forced to take relevant countermeasures, including asymmetrical ones”.
He said that although Russia wasn’t “interested in a direct clash” with the US and NATO, “We hope that Washington and other Western capitals are aware of the danger of an uncontrollable escalation”.
AP/Reuters
This content was originally published here.