The United States today announced an additional $250 million in aid to Ukraine. That help will be unwavering, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin told the Ramstein-style gathering of Ukraine’s allies.
“We must help Ukraine speed up the end of the war. If Ukraine is not free, the world will not be safe,” Austin said.
Volodymyr Zelensky, who was present at the meeting, noted that today Ukraine controls 1,300 square kilometers of territory in Russia, including more than 100 settlements. Earlier, on his Telegram channel, he called for decisiveness among allies, while also asking for the speeding up of arms deliveries.
“We need all the weapons from the already announced support packages to finally reach the combat brigades,” the President of Ukraine stated.
“We want to end this war,” Zelensky assured, stressing that it is Putin who does not want it, and peace must be imposed on him.
“That’s what the attack on Kursk is for,” Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Sirsky said in an interview with CNN. “It reduced the risk of an enemy attack. We moved the fighting into enemy territory so that the enemy feels what we feel every day.”
It has been exactly one month since the Ukrainian army invaded Russia.
Yesterday, President Putin announced that the Russians managed to stop the Ukrainians and will certainly push them back, without specifying specific dates.
Sirsky, meanwhile, claims that Ukrainians are firmly standing on Russian soil. According to him, the aim of the attack that started a month ago is to prevent Russia from using Kursk as a starting point for a new attack, to create a security zone, and to raise the morale of the Ukrainian troops and the country.
Sirsky, by the way, in the interview not only talked about the successes on the Kursk front, but also claimed that the Ukrainian forces managed to stop the Russians in the direction of Pokrovsk. – “During the last six days, the enemy has not advanced a single meter in the direction of Pokrovsk. In other words, our strategy is working.”
Pokrovsk is of strategic importance for Ukrainians, the supplies of the army pass through this city. In recent days, the Russian army reached the villages located about 10 km from Pokrovsk. Although military bloggers wrote two days ago that the advance had slowed, yesterday the Russian Defense Ministry announced the capture of a new settlement, the village of Zavetnoye. The Ukrainian side has not yet commented on this information.
It is hot on the fronts of the war that has been going on for two and a half years. Experts almost unanimously claim that the war will last a long time. Meanwhile, only on the Russian side, the number of confirmed victims reaches tens of thousands. Journalists of the BBC Russian Service, Mediazona and their volunteers have identified and recorded the names of at least 68,011 Russian soldiers and mercenaries who died in the war based on open data. Meanwhile, the actual number of victims may be higher, journalists say.
Neither Ukraine nor Russia published official fresh data. The last time Russia spoke about its victims was exactly two years ago, a few months after the war. At that time, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced the death of 5,937 soldiers, which, according to experts, was far from reality.
The last official assessment in Ukraine was given in February of this year, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that 31,000 Ukrainians were killed in the war that has been going on for more than two years.
