Russian forces have stepped up their shelling in Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, Kyiv said yesterday, after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said to expect greater hostilities ahead of a historic EU decision on Ukraine’s bid for candidate status.
Nearly four months after Russia launched a bloody invasion of his nation, Zelenskiy said in his evening address on Sunday that there had been “few such fateful decisions for Ukraine” as the one it expects from the EU this week.
“Obviously, we expect Russia to intensify hostile activity this week... We are preparing. We are ready,” he said.
Photo: Reuters / Ukrainian Presidential Press Service
Leaders of the EU’s 27 member states are to discuss at a summit on Thursday and Friday whether to add Ukraine to the list of nations vying for membership.
EU foreign ministers gathering in Luxembourg began the week urging Moscow to stop blocking the export of vitally needed grain from Ukraine, a top global supplier.
“One cannot imagine that millions of tonnes of wheat remain blocked in Ukraine, while in the rest of the world people are suffering hunger. This is a real war crime,” EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell said.
Moscow has denied responsibility for the food crisis, and blames Western sanctions for the disrupted deliveries that have pushed up cereal prices and fanned fears of famines in vulnerable regions.
On the ground, Russia appeared to be making some battlefield advances in the east.
In its daily update yesterday, Ukraine’s presidency reported heavier Russian shelling in the Kharkiv region in the northeast.
In the Donetsk region, the intensity of the attacks “is growing along the entire front line” it said, leaving at least one person dead and injuring seven people, including a child.
Fighting also continued in the key industrial city of Severodonetsk in the east, with Ukraine saying that it had lost control of the adjacent village of Metyolkine.
“Unfortunately, we do not control Metyolkine anymore and the enemy continues to build up its reserves,” Lugansk Governor Sergiy Gaiday wrote on social media.
Moscow’s forces have for weeks been battling to seize the eastern Donbas region, after being repelled from other parts of the nation following the Feb. 24 invasion.
A chemical plant in Severodonetsk, where hundreds of civilians are said to be sheltering, was being shelled “constantly,” Gaiday said.
On Sunday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that the war could grind on “for years,” and urged Western nations to be ready to offer long-term military, political and economic aid.
Ukraine has repeatedly urged Western nations to step up their deliveries of arms, despite warnings from nuclear-armed Russia that it could trigger wider conflict.
The Russian Ministry of Defense on Sunday said that it had launched missile strikes during the previous 24 hours, with one attack on a top-level Ukrainian military meeting near the city of Dnipro killing “more than 50 generals and officers.”
It said that it also targeted a building housing weapons in Mykolaiv, destroying Ukrainian artillery and armored vehicles.
There was no independent verification of the claims.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS