NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Russian President Vladimir Putin was “trying to use winter as a weapon of war” as Moscow’s forces were defeated on the battlefield.
US and European officials said the ministers would focus in their talks on non-lethal aid such as fuel, medical supplies and winter equipment, as well as military aid. Washington said it would provide $53 million to buy Power Grid equipment.
US President Joe Biden said providing more military aid to Ukraine was a priority, but Republicans, who took control of the House of Representatives in January, have spoken of freezing the funding, which has grown to more than $18 billion.
accumulated damage
Russia has been carrying out major attacks on Ukraine’s electricity transmission and heating infrastructure roughly weekly since October, which Kyiv and its allies say is a deliberate campaign to harm civilians, a war crime .
In Kyiv, snow was falling and temperatures were hovering around freezing as millions of people in and around the capital struggled to heat their homes. An electricity company official said on Facebook that 985,500 customers in Kyiv were without power, and another electricity provider said the city would have emergency power cuts on Wednesday.
In a brief posting on Telegram, Yaroslav Yanushevich, the governor of the Kherson region, said Tuesday that power had been restored to half of Kherson city.
Ukrainian forces attacked a power plant in Russia’s Kursk region on Tuesday, causing some power outages, the region’s governor Roman Starovoit said on the Telegram messaging app.
Moscow says it does not intend to hurt civilians, but their suffering will only end if Kyiv accepts its demands, which it has not clarified. Although Kyiv says it shoots down most incoming missiles, the damage continues to mount and the effects more severe with each attack.
A senior US military official said on Tuesday that Russia was firing unarmed cruise missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads at targets in Ukraine in an attempt to whittle down Kyiv’s air defense stockpile.
The deadliest attack to date took place on 23 November, plunging millions of Ukrainians into the cold and darkness. Zelensky earlier this week told Ukrainians to expect another one soon that would be the least damaging.
There is no political dialogue to end the war. Moscow has annexed Ukrainian territory, which it says it will never give up; Ukraine says it will fight until it takes back all the occupied land.
