The United States will reopen its embassy in Ukraine soon, its top diplomat said yesterday after he and the US defence secretary visited Kyiv, promising more military aid and hailing its success in pushing back Russia’s invasion.
Both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said the fact they were able to come to Ukraine’s capital was proof of its tenacity in forcing Moscow to abandon an assault on Kyiv last month.
“What you’ve done in repelling the Russians in the battle of Kyiv is extraordinary and inspiring quite frankly to the rest of the world,” Austin told President Volodymyr Zelensky at a meeting overnight after a train journey from Poland. “We are here to support you in any way possible.”
Blinken praised Ukraine’s achievement “in pushing back this horrific Russian aggression.”
“In terms of Russia’s war aims, Russia has already failed and Ukraine has already succeeded,” he told a briefing in Poland on their way back from Ukraine.
Austin said: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
The two-month-old war has killed or injured thousands, reduced towns and cities to rubble and sent more than five million people fleeing abroad. But Russian forces were forced to pull back from the outskirts of Kyiv in the face of stiff Ukrainian resistance and they have yet to capture a major city.
US officials said the two pledged $713mn in new assistance for Ukraine and other countries in the region seen as potentially vulnerable to Russian threats.
An extra $322mn in military aid for Ukraine would take the total US security assistance since the invasion began to about $3.7bn, one official said.
Russia’s ambassador in Washington said Moscow had sent a diplomatic note demanding a halt to US arms shipments to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia was trying to disrupt arms supplies to Ukraine from its allies by bombing its rail infrastructure, Ukraine’s military command said in a Facebook post yesterday.
Russia’s defence ministry said later its missiles destroyed six facilities powering the railways that were used to deliver foreign weapons to Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region. Five railway stations came under fire in western and central Ukraine yesterday and one person was killed, Ukrainian television quoted state-run Ukrainian Railways as saying.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the reports of attacks on rail infrastructure.
Blinken said US diplomats would first come to the western city of Lviv and should be back in Kyiv within weeks. The White House said President Joe Biden had nominated Bridget Brink, now US ambassador in Slovakia, to be the new envoy to Kyiv.
But away from the capital, war rages on in Ukraine’s east and south where Russia last week launched a massive offensive.
Russian forces were continuing yesterday to bomb and shell the vast Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol where Ukrainian fighters are hunkered down in a city ravaged during two months of Russian siege and bombardment, Ukrainian presidential aide Oleksiy Arestovych said in a video address.
Moscow said it was opening a humanitarian corridor to let civilians out of the plant but Kyiv said no agreement had been reached and appealed to the United Nations for help in reaching one as “initiator and guarantor”.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has been seeking a humanitarian truce in Ukraine, is due to meet Putin in Moscow today and Zelensky in Kyiv on Thursday. Mariupol will feature in the Moscow talks, according to Russia’s RIA news agency quoting the foreign ministry.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin attend a meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv. (Reuters)
