AFP

International backers of Ukraine vowed on Wednesday to deliver new air defences “as fast as we can”, as Kyiv pressed them to bolster protection against Russia’s missile blitz.

A US-led group of some 50 countries held talks at NATO headquarters in Brussels with the focus on air defences after Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed a barrage across Ukraine following a blast at a bridge to the annexed Crimea peninsula. 

Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said just three words when asked what he hoped for from the meeting: “Air defence systems.”

Western allies have scrambled to work out how to supply more advanced systems to Ukraine as diplomats admit they have precious few to spare.

“The systems will be provided, as fast as we can physically get them there,” United States Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said after the meeting, without giving details on any new pledges.  

“We’re going to provide systems that we have available … We’re also going to try to provide additional munitions to the existing systems that the Ukrainian forces are using.”

A first Iris-T medium-range system has arrived in Ukraine after Germany decided to ship it before even giving it to its own troops. 

The United States has also said it is looking to expedite the delivery of its NASAMS anti-missile and anti-drone system to Kyiv and a first batch of two is expected in the coming weeks. 

Deliveries of a further six units could take far longer as they need to be manufactured and US sources said Washington is eyeing the possibility of trying to get Cold War-era Hawk systems to Ukraine in the meantime. 

“There’s other systems out there throughout the world that are available,” US top general Mark Milley said. 

“The task will be to bring those together, get them deployed.”

– ‘Pivotal moment’ –

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky had called on G7 leaders on Tuesday to help establish an “air shield” over his country more than seven months into the war against Moscow. 

Austin said that the resolve of Ukraine’s allies to support Kyiv had been “heightened by the deliberate cruelty of Russia’s new barrage against Ukraine’s cities”. 

“Those assaults on targets with no military purpose again revealed the malice of Putin’s war of choice,” he said. 

NATO defence ministers, who will meet on Thursday, are pushing for ways to bolster their overall weapons stockpiles as the war in Ukraine has depleted their shelves.

NATO members have supplied weaponry worth billions of dollars to help fight Russia’s more than seven-month invasion of Ukraine and have vowed to keep supplies flowing as Kyiv pushes to recapture occupied territories. 

“Allies have provided support to Ukraine by reducing NATO stocks, or ammunition, or weapons. This has been the right thing to do, but of course, we need to address how to refill those stocks,” Stoltenberg said. 

“I expect that the ministers will agree to review our guidelines for stocks and also to engage more with industry.”

The NATO chief said the meeting in Brussels comes at a “pivotal moment” as Putin has followed up battlefield losses by annexing seized territory and issuing veiled nuclear threats. 

Western powers say they have seen no change in Moscow’s nuclear posture that would suggest it is getting ready to launch a strike. They have warned Moscow against deploying any small, tactical atomic bomb in Ukraine.

“There would be a sharp response — almost certainly drawing a physical response from many allies, and potentially from NATO itself,” a senior NATO official said. 

Ukraine said Wednesday it reclaimed more territory from Russia in the south and welcomed the delivery of Western air defences Kyiv said would herald a “new era” after mass strikes by Moscow.

Russia for two days pummelled Ukraine with missiles, damaging energy facilities nationwide, in attacks that President Vladimir Putin said were retaliation for a deadly explosion at the Crimea bridge.

Moscow’s FSB security service said Wednesday it detained eight suspects over the blast that ripped through the road and rail bridge connecting Crimea to Russia.

But it also claimed to have foiled two more attacks that Ukrainian special services allegedly planned to carry out on Russian territory.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday after Russia’s missile barrage that Ukraine’s Western backers were looking to provide Kyiv with more air defences to protect against Russia’s “indiscriminate” attacks across the country. 

“The top priority will be more air defence for Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said at the start of a meeting by Ukraine’s allies on arms supplies to Kyiv.

United States Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said after the meeting “the systems will be provided, as fast as we can physically get them there”. 

Putin has vowed a “severe” response to any further attack on Russia and what Moscow considers to be its territory, including the Crimea peninsula that it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Despite warnings from the Kremlin, Kyiv has vowed to retake the peninsula as well as four regions in Ukraine’s east and south that Moscow says are now part of Russia.

Kyiv said Wednesday that it had retaken five more settlements in the southern region of Kherson — one of the four territories Moscow said it annexed in late September — in the latest setback for Russia’s campaign.

– Putin ‘miscalculated’ –

The Russian military meanwhile said it had fended off Ukrainian attacks in the eastern Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkiv regions.

And Russian strikes on the frontline town of Avdiivka killed at least eight people at a market, the Ukraine-appointed chief of the region said.

The Ukrainian army announced its counter-offensive in the south in late August. 

After regaining almost full control of the northeastern region of Kharkiv, Ukrainian forces recently claimed more gains on the eastern and southern fronts.

Faced with mounting setbacks since September, the Russian president announced the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of reservists to join the fighting in Ukraine. 

With the Crimea bridge blast, Russia also lost a vital transport link for moving military equipment for its soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

US President Joe Biden said Tuesday that he believes his Russian counterpart “miscalculated” the situation in Ukraine and underestimated the ferocity of Ukrainian defiance.

“He thought he was going to be welcomed with open arms, that this was the home of Mother Russia in Kyiv,” Biden told CNN in a rare televised interview.

“I think he just totally miscalculated.”

Putin is due to meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Kazakhstan later this week, with a Kremlin official suggesting Ankara will formally offer to mediate talks between Russia and Ukraine.

– Mass graves discovered –

After two days of nationwide Russian strikes that especially targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, leaving villages and towns without power and hot water, Ukraine said it had started receiving anti-aircraft defence systems from its Western allies. 

“A new era of air defence has begun in Ukraine,” Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said on Twitter, announcing the arrival of Germany’s Iris-Ts and the upcoming delivery of NASAMS from Washington. 

He said he had met with Austin and General Mark Milley and discussed the “strengthening of the combat potential of the Ukrainian army”, according to a tweet.

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the G7 club of wealthy nations to help Kyiv create an “air shield”, warning that Russia “still has room for further escalation”.

On the frontline in Donetsk, Western weapons have helped boost Ukrainian morale and the abilities of Kyiv’s forces.

“We definitely need more artillery,” said an officer who gave his name as “Sergiy” with Ukraine’s 5th Regiment on a hill overlooking Russian-held Gorlivka in Donetsk.

“When it comes to artillery, they still have an advantage so we can’t return fire equally. 

“We are firing more precisely now, but with fewer strikes,” Sergiy said about the US-made Mk-19 automatic grenade launcher.

In two towns elsewhere in the Donetsk region, Ukrainian officials announced Tuesday the recovery of the remains of dozens of civilians found at mass burial sites.

In Lyman, a railway hub retaken by Ukraine in early October, a forensic team dressed in protective gear was exhuming dozens of bodies, an AFP journalist saw. 

More than 50 bodies of both soldiers and civilians were found, officials said.

Russian forces have been accused of numerous abuses — torture, rape, extrajudicial executions — in Ukraine, claims Moscow has repeatedly denied.

Global finance chiefs were expected to discuss a proposed price cap on Russian oil and support for Ukraine on Wednesday as the conflict takes center stage during the IMF’s annual meetings.

Finance ministers and central bankers from around the world are gathering in Washington this week for the first fully in-person gathering hosted by the International Monetary Fund since 2019.

The office of US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Tuesday she would “redouble efforts to advance a price cap on Russian oil, continue to lead the broad alliance leveling sanctions on Russia, and encourage our partners to accelerate and increase the scale of economic assistance to Ukraine.”

Finance ministers from the Group of Seven wealthy democracies were due to talk on Wednesday about setting a ceiling on Russia’s oil exports — a move aimed at denying Moscow of a major source of funding for its war and containing soaring energy prices.

Hours earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin lashed out at the proposal, which the United States has pushed and the European Commission has proposed.

“With their cavalier decisions, some Western politicians are destroying the global market economy and are in fact posing a threat to the well-being of billions of people,” Putin told an energy forum in Moscow.

Moscow has warned that it would cut off oil supplies to countries that impose such a cap.

Officials have yet to say at what level the cap would be set, but they have said that it would remain above the cost of production so that Russia would still have an incentive to supply importing countries.

At a separate event, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and World Bank President David Malpass were scheduled to talk with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmygal on how to support the war-torn country.

The IMF said last week it would provide $1.3 billion in emergency aid to Ukraine through its new food crisis assistance program. The World Bank earlier granted $530 million in additional aid to the country.

The United States has provided $65 billion in aid, including military equipment to Kyiv since February, while EU nations have given weapons and promised $9 billion in loans to the country.

President Joe Biden’s administration said Wednesday it would prioritize winning a competition with China, seeing it as the only global rival to the United States, even as it also works to constrain a “dangerous” Russia.

Releasing a national security strategy delayed by the Ukraine war, the White House said the 2020s would be a “decisive decade for America and the world,” both for reducing conflict and confronting the key shared threat of climate change.

“We will prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive edge over the PRC while constraining a still profoundly dangerous Russia,” the strategy said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

“The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy,” it said.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia “poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order today, as its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has shown,” the strategy added.

China, “by contrast, is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective.”

The strategy is largely consistent with interim guidance the administration laid out shortly after taking office in January 2021, even as Biden for most of this year has focused on rallying allies against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and sending billions of dollars in weapons to Kyiv.

“I don’t believe that the war in Ukraine has fundamentally altered Joe Biden’s approach to foreign policy, which long predates his presidency,” said his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan.

“But I do believe that it presents in living color the key elements of our approach — the emphasis on allies, the importance of strengthening the hand of the democratic world and standing up for our fellow democracies and for democratic values,” he told reporters.

– China wants to be ‘world’s leading power’ –

The strategy said the United States was willing to work even with competitors on shared interests, amid the Biden team’s talks with top carbon emitter China on climate change, described as “the existential challenge of our time.”

But the White House emphasized risks from China, warning that its rapid advances in technology aimed to mold the world order in support of “its own authoritarian model.”

Despite Beijing’s repeated denials it is seeking hegemony, the strategy said China “has ambitions to create an enhanced sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and to become the world’s leading power,” using the favored US term for the broader Asia region.

The White House also tied a rising China to Biden’s vows to prioritize the US middle class, saying Beijing was seeking to make the world dependent on its economy while limiting access to its own billion-plus market.

The strategy called for major investment at home, two months after Biden signed a $52 billion package to improve US capacity for semiconductors, but also said the United States sought to “coexist peacefully” with China and manage the competition “responsibly.”

“We are not seeking to have competition tip over into confrontation or a new Cold War and we are not engaging each country as simply a proxy battleground,” Sullivan said.

The strategy release comes as Biden vows a reassessment of relations with one longtime US ally, Saudi Arabia, which moved to slash oil output — benefitting energy exporter Russia and potentially raising gas prices for American consumers weeks before congressional elections.

Amid reconciliation between Israel and Gulf Arab states, the strategy called for a “more integrated Middle East” that would reduce the long-term “resource demands” of the United States, which for decades has provided security for oil-producing nations.

Biden, who controversially traveled to Saudi Arabia in June, will be asking whether the nature of the relationship with the kingdom is “serving the interests and values of the United States” and whether changes should be made, Sullivan said.