Ukrainian soldiers ride atop a tank through a street in Pokrovsk, Donetsk region, in eastern Ukraine
KYIV, July 9 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Ukraine urged its allies to send more weapons as its forces dug in to slow Russia’s military advance through the eastern Donbas region, while a belligerent Moscow warned Western nations of consequences for their reprisals over its invasion.
Signalling that the Kremlin was in no mood for compromise, President Vladimir Putin said continued use of sanctions against Russia risked causing “catastrophic” energy price rises.
Putin’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov clashed with his Western counterparts at a Group of 20 meeting, where they urged Russia to allow Kyiv to ship blockaded Ukrainian grain out to an increasingly hungry world.
Meanwhile, Moscow’s envoy to London offered little prospect of a pull-back from parts of Ukraine under Russian control.
Ambassador Andrei Kelin said that Russian troops would capture the rest of Donbas and were unlikely to withdraw from land across the southern coast.
Ukraine would eventually have to strike a peace deal or “continue slipping down this hill” to ruin, he said.
Kelin’s remarks gave an insight into Russia’s potential endgame – a forced partition that would leave its former Soviet neighbour shorn of more than a fifth of its post-Soviet territory.
“We are going to liberate all of the Donbas,” Kelin said.
“Of course it is difficult to predict the withdrawal of our forces from the southern part of Ukraine because we have already experience that after withdrawal, provocations start.”
An escalation of the war was possible, he added.
Ukrainian officials, echoing comments by the deputy commander of the infantry unit outside Siversk, said they needed more high-grade Western weapons to shore up their defences.
Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, said Ukraine still did not have enough Western weapons and soldiers needed time to adapt to using them.
Kyiv has attributed battlefield successes to last month’s arrival of US-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).
“When they came in, the Russian war machine could instantly feel its effect,” Danilov said. But more Western military aid was vital.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s chief of staff also urged the West to send more heavy weapons to counter what he called Russia’s “scorched earth tactics”.
“With a sufficient number of howitzers, SPG and HIMARS, our soldiers are able to stop and drive the invaders from our land,” Andriy Yermak wrote on Twitter.
The biggest conflict in Europe since World War Two has killed thousands, displaced millions and flattened Ukrainian cities.
Russia calls it a “special military operation” intended to degrade Ukraine’s military and root out people it sees as dangerous nationalists. Ukraine and its Western allies say Russia is engaged in an unprovoked land grab.
Russian forces have seized a big chunk of territory across Ukraine’s southern flank and are waging a war of attrition in the Donbas, the eastern industrial heartland made up of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces. — NNN-AGENCIES
