Putin has vowed to attack new targets if the U.S. supplies Ukraine with long-range weapons.
The war in Ukraine has now been raging for more than three months, and Russia’s attack shows no sign of faltering. Here’s the latest.
Russians attack Kyiv
Russia fired five cruise missiles at Kyiv yesterday, its first assault on Ukraine’s capital in five weeks. Per Politico, Russia claims that the weekend’s attack destroyed tanks donated to Ukraine by the West.
CNN reports that according to Ukraine’s state-run nuclear power station operator, Energoatom, one of the missiles flew “critically low” over the South Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant.
Energoatom called this “another act of nuclear terrorism,” adding that the Russians “still do not understand that even the smallest fragment of a missile that can hit a working power unit can cause a nuclear catastrophe and radiation leak.”
Putin vows to strike new targets
President Putin has vowed to attack new targets if the U.S. supplies Ukraine with long-range weapons. According to Russian state media — as reported by CNN — Putin said Biden’s pledge of new arms is intended to “drag out the armed conflict for as long as possible.”
“If they are supplied, we will draw appropriate conclusions from this and use our own weapons, of which we have enough, in order to strike at those facilities we are not targeting yet,” he added.
Last week, President Biden agreed to send Ukraine missiles that could reach targets more than 50 miles away, on the condition that Ukraine not use them to strike Russian soil.
“That’s why I’ve decided that we will provide the Ukrainians with more advanced rocket systems and munitions that will enable them to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield in Ukraine,” Biden wrote in The New York Times on Tuesday.
The fight in eastern Ukraine heats up
The fight in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk is intensifying, with the battle in Donetsk’s pivotal city of Severodonetsk heating up.
“The fiercest battles continue here,” Serhiy Hayday, head of the Luhansk regional military administration, said on television per CNN.
“Our defenders managed to counterattack for a while – they liberated almost half of the city,” he continued. “However, now the situation has worsened for us again.”
Hayday
explained that Russia is using “scorched-earth” tactics — which usually refers to making a military target as unattractive a potential prize as possible, and destroying anything that might be useful to the enemy. This includes transport links, economic assets, weapons, industrial resources, and communications links. The intensity of the fighting has made evacuating Severodonetsk’s 15,000 remaining citizens impossible.
