At a meeting with Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) leaders in Latvia on Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy immediately requested more military and defense support.
“Russian aggression can and must fail. And our task now is to accelerate it. Now – at this summit – I urge you to do everything to accelerate the defeat of the occupiers,” he said.
The British force includes Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway; eight of the group are also members of NATO, with Finland and Sweden outside that alliance.
Earlier Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a rare visit to Minsk, extolling the benefits of cooperation with neighboring ally Belarus, raising fears in Kyiv that plans for a joint ground offensive are underway.
Ukrainian Joint Forces Commander Serhiy Nayev said he believed Putin’s meeting with his Belarusian counterpart would address “further aggression against Ukraine and the wider involvement of the Belarusian armed forces in the operation against Ukraine, in particular, in our opinion, even in the field .”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko attend a briefing after their talks in Minsk, Belarus, Monday, Dec. 19, 2022. (Pavel Bednyakov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has repeatedly said he has no intention of sending his country’s troops to Ukraine, after providing Russian troops with a launching pad for the invasion in February.
“Russia has no interest in absorbing anyone,” Putin said during the press conference. “There’s just no expediency to this. … It’s not a takeover, it’s a matter of policy alignment.’
Asked about this comment, US State Department spokesman Ned Price said it should be treated as “the height of irony”, given that it “comes from a leader who at the present moment, right now, is trying to violently absorb his other peaceful next. -next door.’
Latest developments in Ukraine: 19 December
Price added that Washington would continue to watch very closely whether Belarus would provide further support to Putin and would respond “appropriately” if it does.
The Kremlin has dismissed the suggestion that Putin wanted to push Belarus into a more active role in the conflict. The RIA Novosti news agency quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying such reports were “baseless” and “stupid”.
None of the journalists present at Monday’s meeting asked Putin or Lukashenko about the war.
Both leaders limited their responses to the increasingly close economic and defensive alignment between the two former Soviet states and the tension ahead of Sunday’s World Cup final in Qatar.
Lukashenko, who at one point called Putin an “older brother”, praised Russia as a friend who had “stretched out his hand to us” and supplied Belarus with oil and gas at discounted prices.
“Russia can do without us, but we cannot (do) without Russia,” he said.
Zelenskyy: Ukraine needs a reliable air defense system
This was Putin’s first trip to Minsk since before the covid-19 pandemic and a wave of pro-democracy protests in 2020 that Lukashenko crushed with strong support from the Kremlin.
The visit came hours after another round of Russian drone strikes targeting Kyiv, during which the Ukrainian air force said its air defenses shot down 30 unmanned aerial vehicles. At least three people were injured and nine buildings damaged in the attack on the Ukrainian capital region, Russia’s third in six days. The latest series of attacks appear to be aimed at destroying Ukraine’s power grid, causing widespread power outages amid sub-zero temperatures.
A firefighter works at a site of a critical power infrastructure object, which was hit during Russia’s drone attacks in Kyiv, December 19, 2022. (Press Service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine/Distributed information via Reuters)
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, speaking to the media on Monday, expressed reservations about the possibility of “effective peace talks” in the near future.
“I think the military confrontation will continue. And I think we still have to wait [for] a moment when serious peace negotiations will be possible. I don’t see them on the immediate horizon, he said.
He also spoke about Putin’s visit to Belarus amid fears of a new offensive against Kyiv.
– Of course we’ll see what happens. There are many rumors about possible new offensives, Guterres said. – My position is very clear. There is never a military solution to these problems. But it is important that the solution is in line with the UN Charter and with international law.
“The UN Charter is very clear in relation to the territorial integrity of countries to be respected,” he added. “The UN Charter is very clear on the use of force not to be accepted to alter in any way their territorial integrity.”
Belarusian Hajun, a crowdsourced channel that monitors the movement of Russian military equipment and weapons, reported that Russia transferred at least 50 military trucks from the Urals and another convoy of 30 trucks to Belarus in the past week.
Russia and Belarus announced in October that they are starting a joint regional force. The Russian news agency Interfax reported on Monday that the Russian Defense Ministry said that the troops deployed for this work will conduct military exercises.
Analysts say the Kremlin may again be looking for some form of Belarusian military support for its operations in Ukraine. But winter weather and Russia’s depleted resources mean a major Russian attack is unlikely to come soon, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.
“The ability of the Russian military, even reinforced by elements of the Belarusian armed forces, to prepare and conduct effective large-scale mechanized offensive operations in the coming months remains in doubt,” the think tank said in an assessment published on Sunday. The document concluded that “it is unlikely that Lukashenko will commit the Belarusian military.” [which would also have to be reequipped] to the invasion of Ukraine.’
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US officials say they plan to send a Patriot anti-aircraft missile battery to Ukraine to help shoot down incoming Russian airstrikes, but no official announcement has been made.
Russia has condemned the expected US action and called it a provocation that increases US involvement in the conflict.
Some information for this story came from the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. VOA’s United Nations correspondent Margaret Besheer contributed to this report.
Source: sn.dk