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KYIV – The United States is set to unveil a fresh round of security assistance to Ukraine today, a White House official said, as Western leaders faced mounting pressure to stop Russia’s bombardment of civilians and peace talks made halting progress.
The official said President Joe Biden will today unveil another US$800 million (RM3.4 billion) worth of military aid, expected to include more of the anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles that have helped slow Russia’s three-week-old invasion to a crawl.
The package will bring “the total (aid) announced in the last week alone to US$1 billion”, said the official.
The move will coincide with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s landmark virtual address to the US Congress – when he is expected to intensify pleas for Nato allies to intervene directly to stop Russian attacks.
In a late-night video message, Zelenskyy urged his beleaguered compatriots to fight on against Russia’s vastly larger military, even as he suggested the conflict would end in a negotiated settlement.
“All wars end with an agreement,” he said, pointing to a “difficult” but “important” ongoing round of talks between representatives from Kyiv and Moscow.
“Meetings continue,” he added. “As I am told, positions during the talks now sound more realistic. But we still need time, so the decisions are made in the interest of Ukraine.”
Recent days have seen an uptick in Russian strikes on civilian targets, including in Kyiv and the besieged port city of Mariupol where there is a critical lack of food, water, and medicine.
Some 20,000 residents of the southern city have been allowed to leave, but exhausted, shivering evacuees speak of harrowing escape journeys and rotting corpses littering the streets.
One of them, Mykola, who asked not to give his full name, drove his wife and two young children through a minefield to escape and to avoid Russian checkpoints.
“This is the first time I have been able to breathe in weeks,” he said.
The conflict has already sent more than three million Ukrainians fleeing across the border, and a peaceful resolution still seems beyond reach.
Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military launched a series of strikes on Kyiv that killed four people.
The attack caused a fire that swept through one 16-storey housing block.
“At 4.20am everything was very thunderous, crackling. When I got up, my daughter ran to me with a question: ‘Are you alive?’,” Lyubov Gura, 73, said. – AFP, March 16, 2022
