US defense secretary vows support to Ukraine ‘for the long haul’ on surprise trip to Kyiv
US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, met with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and has said that American support to Kyiv would continue “for the long haul”, the Associated Press reports.
Austin, who travelled to Kyiv by train from Poland, met with Zelenskiy and was scheduled to meet with the country’s defence minister, Rustem Umerov, and chief of staff Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
In Kyiv, Austin said Ukraine’s effort to defeat Russia’s invasion “matters to the rest of the world” and that US support would continue “for the long haul”.
Zelenskiy said Austin’s visit was “a very important signal for Ukraine.” “We count on your support,“ he added, thanking Congress as well as the American people for their backing.
“I was honored to meet with President Zelenskiy in Kyiv today to reaffirm the United States’ steadfast support for Ukraine”, Austin wrote on X after his meeting.
He said the US, together with allies and partners, would continue to support Ukraine’s needs on the battlefield.
I was honored to meet with President @ZelenskyyUa in Kyiv today to reaffirm the United States’ steadfast support for Ukraine. We, along with our allies and partners, will continue to support Ukraine’s urgent battlefield needs and long-term defense requirements. pic.twitter.com/Odv6ClgcrP
— Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) November 20, 2023
As my colleague Shaun Walker writes, the war in the Middle East has meant that for perhaps the first time since February 2022, Ukraine has not been the main foreign policy issue on most western leaders’ minds for a sustained period of time.
Key events
The US ambassador to Kyiv, Bridget Brink, has said Lloyd Austin’s visit to the Ukrainian capital signalled Washington’s “unwavering support to Ukraine in its fight for freedom”.
US defense secretary vows support to Ukraine ‘for the long haul’ on surprise trip to Kyiv
US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, met with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and has said that American support to Kyiv would continue “for the long haul”, the Associated Press reports.
Austin, who travelled to Kyiv by train from Poland, met with Zelenskiy and was scheduled to meet with the country’s defence minister, Rustem Umerov, and chief of staff Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
In Kyiv, Austin said Ukraine’s effort to defeat Russia’s invasion “matters to the rest of the world” and that US support would continue “for the long haul”.
Zelenskiy said Austin’s visit was “a very important signal for Ukraine.” “We count on your support,“ he added, thanking Congress as well as the American people for their backing.
“I was honored to meet with President Zelenskiy in Kyiv today to reaffirm the United States’ steadfast support for Ukraine”, Austin wrote on X after his meeting.
He said the US, together with allies and partners, would continue to support Ukraine’s needs on the battlefield.
I was honored to meet with President @ZelenskyyUa in Kyiv today to reaffirm the United States’ steadfast support for Ukraine. We, along with our allies and partners, will continue to support Ukraine’s urgent battlefield needs and long-term defense requirements. pic.twitter.com/Odv6ClgcrP
— Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) November 20, 2023
As my colleague Shaun Walker writes, the war in the Middle East has meant that for perhaps the first time since February 2022, Ukraine has not been the main foreign policy issue on most western leaders’ minds for a sustained period of time.
A senior defence official traveling with US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, has told reporters that the US expects that this winter Russia will go after Ukraine’s infrastructure again, like the power grid, making air defences critical, the Associated Press reports.
Earlier this month, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, warned Ukrainians to prepare for new waves of Russian attacks on infrastructure as winter approaches.
Last winter, about 10 months into the invasion, Russia made waves of attacks on power stations and other plants linked to the energy network, prompting rolling blackouts in widely disparate regions.
Finland’s president, Sauli Niinisto, has said it had become impossible to return asylum seekers who do not meet the criteria for protection, and that this had to be taken into account when policies are set, Reuters reports.
Finland has closed four crossing points on its border with Russia as Helsinki seeks to halt a flow of asylum seekers it says was instigated by Moscow, leaving only four stations open.
The Kremlin has denied sending migrants and said earlier that Finland’s decision to shut border crossings reflected Helsinki’s adoption of an anti-Russian stance (see earlier post at 09.41).
The bodies of 94 Ukrainian soldiers were returned to territory controlled by the Ukrainian government on Monday, the official account for the Coordinating Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War wrote on Telegram.
In exchange, Ukraine transferred the bodies of an unspecified number of Russian soldiers killed in combat to the Russian side, the headquarters said.
“The Armed Forces of Ukraine will ensure the transportation of repatriated bodies and remains to designated state specialized institutions for transfer to representatives of law enforcement agencies and forensic medical experts for identification of the deceased,” it wrote.
Here are some images from Kherson following reported Russian shelling (Reuters was not able to independently verify the location or the date when the video the images were taken from was filmed):
The UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said the public street protest in Moscow, led by wives of deployed Russian soldiers, on 7 November, was likely the first such demonstrations in the Russian capital since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February.
In its latest intelligence update, the MoD wrote on X:
The protestors gathered in the central Teatralnya Square and unfurled banners demanding the rotation of their partners away from the frontline.
Since February 2022, social media has provided daily examples of Russian wives and mothers making online appeals protesting against the conditions of their loved ones’ service.
However, Russia’s draconian legislation has so far prevented troops’ relatives from coalescing into an influential lobbying force, as soldiers’ mothers did during the Afghan-Soviet War of the 1980s.
Police broke up the Teatralnya Square protest within minutes. However, the protestors’ immediate demand is notable.
The apparently indefinitely extended combat deployments of personnel without rotation is increasingly seen as unsustainable by both the troops themselves and by their relatives.
Here is what the governor of the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, has posted on Telegram about the reports of two people being killed in Kherson by Russian shelling (see earlier post at 08.25)
He wrote:
In the morning, the Russian army shelled the parking lot of a private transport company in Kherson.
As a result of the enemy attack, two drivers were killed, another person was injured. Cars and a residential building were damaged.
These claims are yet to be independently verified.
Nato supports Bosnia’s territorial integrity and is concerned by “malign foreign interference,” including by Russia, in the volatile Balkans region that went through a devastating war in the 1990s, Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said.
Sarajevo is the first stop on Stoltenberg’s tour of western Balkan countries that will also include Kosovo, Serbia and North Macedonia, the Associated Press reports.
“The Allies strongly support the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Stoltenberg told reporters. “We are concerned by the secessionist and divisive rhetoric as well as malign foreign interference, including Russia.”
There are widespread fears that Russia is trying to destabilize Bosnia and the rest of the region and therefore shift at least some world attention from its war in Ukraine.
Morning summary
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The US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, arrived in Kyiv on Monday for a visit. “I’m here today to deliver an important message: the United States will continue to stand with Ukraine in their fight for freedom against Russia’s aggression, both now and into the future.”
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Two people were killed early on Monday after Russian forces shelled a parking lot in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, authorities said. Regional prosecutors opened a war crimes investigation into the artillery strike, which occurred at about 9am (7am GMT) and injured one other person, the regional prosecutor’s office reported.
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A Ukrainian soldier and a woman have died after a grenade exploded in a Kyiv apartment, police in the Ukrainian capital have said, but the cause of the blast, which injured a second man, was not immediately clear. Explosives technicians and investigators were working at the scene of Sunday’s explosion in the Dniprovskiy district, Kyiv police said in a statement.
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The Ukrainian army said it had pushed back Russian forces “three to eight kilometres” from the banks of the Dnipro River, which if confirmed would be the first meaningful advance by Kyiv’s forces months into a disappointing counteroffensive. Ukrainian and Russian forces have been entrenched on opposite sides of the vast waterway in the southern Kherson region for more than a year, after Russia withdrew its troops from the western bank last November.
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A Ukrainian teenager who was taken to Russia from the occupied city of Mariupol during the war and prevented from leaving earlier this year has returned to Ukraine. Bohdan Yermokhin, who turned 18 on Sunday, appealed to Zelenskiy this month to help bring him back to Ukraine. “I believed I would be in Ukraine, but not on this day,” Yermokhin told Reuters while eating at a petrol station after crossing the border.
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About 3,000 mostly Ukrainian trucks, including those carrying fuel and humanitarian aid, were stuck on the Polish side of the border on Sunday due to a more than 10-day blockade by Polish truckers, Ukrainian authorities said.
Polish truckers earlier this month blocked roads to three border crossings with Ukraine to protest against what they see as government inaction over a loss of business to foreign competitors since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. -
Air defence units in Moscow intercepted a drone targeting the city late Sunday, mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. Sobyanin, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said units in the Elektrostal district in the capital’s east had intercepted the drone. No casualties or damage were initially reported. Air defences had also thwarted a drone attack on the Russian capital overnight to Sunday, authorities said earlier.
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Russia launched 20 Iranian-made Shahed drones targeting Kyiv and the Cherkasy and Poltava regions overnight into Sunday, the Ukrainian military said, of which 15 were shot down. The overnight strikes on Kyiv were the second attack on the Ukrainian capital in 48 hours, said the city’s military administration spokesperson, Serhii Popko.
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Five people including a three-year-old girl were injured in Russian artillery shelling of Kherson on Sunday morning, the Ukrainian interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, said. “All of them sustained shrapnel wounds. The child and the grandmother were walking in the yard. Enemy artillery hit them near the entrance,” Klymenko said on the Telegram messaging app.
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The pro-war Russian nationalist Igor Girkin, who is in custody awaiting trial for inciting extremism, said he wanted to run for president even though he understood the March election would be a “sham” with the winner already clear. Girkin, who is also known by the alias Igor Strelkov, has repeatedly said Russia faces revolution and even civil war unless President Vladimir Putin’s military top brass fight the war in Ukraine more effectively. A former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer who helped Russia to annex Crimea in 2014 and then to organise pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine, Girkin said before his arrest that he and his supporters were entering politics.
The Kremlin, facing the prospect of a European Union ban on imports of Russian diamonds, said on Monday that EU sanctions tended to have a “boomerang effect” on those who applied them, Reuters reports.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov was commenting on a proposed EU ban on diamond imports from Russia as part of a new sanctions package against Moscow over the conflict in Ukraine.
Russia is the world’s biggest producer of rough diamonds by volume. Peskov told reporters such a move had been anticipated for a long time, but was likely to backfire.
“As a rule, it turns out that a boomerang effect is partially triggered: the interests of the Europeans themselves suffer. So far, we have been able to find ways to minimise the negative consequences of sanctions,” he said.
EU diplomatic sources said last week the proposal under discussion was to ban direct diamond imports from Russia from 1 January and from March to implement a traceability mechanism that would prevent imports of Russian gems processed in third countries.
The Kremlin said on Monday that president Vladimir Putin will set out Russia’s view of what it sees as the “deeply unstable world situation” when he addresses an upcoming virtual G20 summit.
Russian state TV presenter Pavel Zarubin said on his Telegram channel on Sunday that it would be the “first event in a long time” including both Putin and western leaders.
According to the state RIA news agency, the G20 virtual summit will be held on Wednesday.
The Kremlin said on Monday it regretted Finland’s decision to shut crossings on its border with Russia, saying it reflected Helsinki’s adoption of an anti-Russian stance, Reuters reports.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, speaking at a regular news briefing, also rejected Finland’s accusation that Russia is deliberately pushing illegal migrants towards the border and said that Russian border guards were following all instructions.
Finland, a member of the European Union and – from this year – also of the Nato military alliance, closed four crossings on its border with Russia on Saturday as Helsinki seeks to halt a flow of asylum seekers it says was instigated by Moscow.
The US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, arrives in Kyiv on Monday morning.
Two killed by Russian shelling in Kherson, Ukrainian authorities say
Reuters reports that two people were killed early on Monday after Russian forces shelled a parking lot in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, authorities said.
Regional prosecutors opened a war crimes investigation into the artillery strike, which occurred at about 9am (7am GMT) and injured one other person, the regional prosecutor’s office reported.
The Kherson governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said the two dead were drivers for a private transport business.
Images posted on Telegram showed firefighters dousing cars that had been blasted apart, one day after a separate strike on the city wounded five people, including a three-year-old girl.
Russian forces have regularly shelled Kherson from across the Dnipro River since the regional capital was reoccupied by Ukrainian troops last November.
Ukraine said last week it had secured a foothold on the eastern bank of the Dnipro and that its troops were trying to push Russian forces further back.
US defence secretary visits Kyiv
The US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, arrived in Kyiv on Monday for a visit, he said on the X social media platform, Reuters reports.
“I’m here today to deliver an important message: the United States will continue to stand with Ukraine in their fight for freedom against Russia’s aggression, both now and into the future.”
The visit comes amid increasing division over Ukraine aid in the US legislature. A joint Ukraine-US military industry conference in Washington is due to take place next month.
That event, due to be held on 6-7 December, is intended to boost Ukraine’s domestic arms production as its fight against a full-scale Russian invasion nears the two-year mark.
Reuters reports that a Japanese delegation led by senior industry and foreign ministry officials and including business representatives is visiting Ukraine on Monday for talks ahead of a reconstruction conference that Japan will host, the industry ministry said.
Japan, which has been supporting Ukraine with funds and by accepting refugees since Russia invaded in February 2022, has also been promoting support for Ukraine at the level of the G7, which Japan chairs this year.
Kazuchika Iwata, the state minister of economy, trade and industry (METI), and the state minister for foreign affairs Kiyoto Tsuji, are visiting together with representatives of Japan companies, METI said in a statement.
In Kyiv, the delegation, which includes members of Keidanren, Japan’s biggest business lobby, in charge of a committee on Ukraine’s reconstruction, plans talks with the prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, government officials and companies.
Shmyhal said this month Ukraine would need budget support of about $42bn this year and next year to plug a massive deficit and aid reconstruction from the devastation caused by Russia’s invasion.
METI said the visit was an opportunity to hear about Ukraine’s needs and to discuss specific projects and accelerate public and private efforts to help.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy – who visited Japan in May during a G7 summit – and the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, agreed this month to hold a Japan-Ukraine Conference for promotion of Economic Reconstruction in Tokyo on 19 February.
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
A Ukrainian soldier and a woman have died after a grenade exploded in a Kyiv apartment, police in the Ukrainian capital have said, but the cause of the blast, which injured a second man, was not immediately clear.
Explosives technicians and investigators were working at the scene of Sunday’s explosion in the Dniprovskiy district, Kyiv police said in a statement.
“A citizen contacted the police with a report that an explosion rang out in a neighbouring apartment,” they added.
The news came as Volodymyr Zelenskiy dismissed the commander of the military’s medical forces, Maj Gen Tetiana Ostashchenko, and said “new priorities had been set” in the operations of Ukraine’s military after a meeting with the defence minister, Rustem Umerov.
“There is little time left to wait for results. Quick action is needed for forthcoming changes,” the Ukrainian president said in his evening video address.
In other key developments:
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The Ukrainian army said it had pushed back Russian forces “three to eight kilometres” from the banks of the Dnipro River, which if confirmed would be the first meaningful advance by Kyiv’s forces months into a disappointing counteroffensive. Ukrainian and Russian forces have been entrenched on opposite sides of the vast waterway in the southern Kherson region for more than a year, after Russia withdrew its troops from the western bank last November.
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A Ukrainian teenager who was taken to Russia from the occupied city of Mariupol during the war and prevented from leaving earlier this year has returned to Ukraine. Bohdan Yermokhin, who turned 18 on Sunday, appealed to Zelenskiy this month to help bring him back to Ukraine. “I believed I would be in Ukraine, but not on this day,” Yermokhin told Reuters while eating at a petrol station after crossing the border.
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About 3,000 mostly Ukrainian trucks, including those carrying fuel and humanitarian aid, were stuck on the Polish side of the border on Sunday due to a more than 10-day blockade by Polish truckers, Ukrainian authorities said.
Polish truckers earlier this month blocked roads to three border crossings with Ukraine to protest against what they see as government inaction over a loss of business to foreign competitors since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. -
Air defence units in Moscow intercepted a drone targeting the city late Sunday, mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. Sobyanin, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said units in the Elektrostal district in the capital’s east had intercepted the drone. No casualties or damage were initially reported. Air defences had also thwarted a drone attack on the Russian capital overnight to Sunday, authorities said earlier.
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Russia launched 20 Iranian-made Shahed drones targeting Kyiv and the Cherkasy and Poltava regions overnight into Sunday, the Ukrainian military said, of which 15 were shot down. The overnight strikes on Kyiv were the second attack on the Ukrainian capital in 48 hours, said the city’s military administration spokesperson, Serhii Popko.
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Five people including a three-year-old girl were injured in Russian artillery shelling of Kherson on Sunday morning, the Ukrainian interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, said. “All of them sustained shrapnel wounds. The child and the grandmother were walking in the yard. Enemy artillery hit them near the entrance,” Klymenko said on the Telegram messaging app.
-
The pro-war Russian nationalist Igor Girkin, who is in custody awaiting trial for inciting extremism, said he wanted to run for president even though he understood the March election would be a “sham” with the winner already clear. Girkin, who is also known by the alias Igor Strelkov, has repeatedly said Russia faces revolution and even civil war unless President Vladimir Putin’s military top brass fight the war in Ukraine more effectively. A former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer who helped Russia to annex Crimea in 2014 and then to organise pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine, Girkin said before his arrest that he and his supporters were entering politics.
