Joe Biden has allowed Ukraine to strike inside Russia with long-range US missiles, according to reports. Meanwhile, at least seven people have been killed in one of Russia’s largest air attacks on Ukraine targeting the country’s energy grid ahead of the winter months.
Sunday 17 November 2024 18:25, UK
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Joe Biden has allowed Ukraine to strike inside Russia with long-range US missiles, sources have told Reuters.
Ukraine plans to conduct its first long-range attacks in the coming days, the sources said, without revealing details due to operational security concerns.
The move by the US comes after months of requests by Volodymyr Zelenskyy to allow Ukraine’s military to use US weapons to hit Russian military targets far from its border.
The change follows Russia’s deployment of North Korean ground troops to supplement its own forces, a development that has caused alarm in Washington and Kyiv.
The first deep strikes are likely to be carried out using ATACMS rockets, which have a range of up to 190 miles, according to the sources.
Sir Keir Starmer, is on his way to Rio de Janerio, Brazil, for the G20 summit.
En route, he took questions from journalists from Sky News and other outlets, and he was asked about the German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s decision to speak to Vladimir Putin, which sparked a furious reaction from Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The PM said: “It’s a matter for Chancellor Schloz who he speaks to. I have no plans to speak to Putin.”
He noted that we are approaching the thousandth day of the war, “1,000 days of huge impact and sacrifice in relation to Ukrainian people”.
More broadly, Sir Keir said the deployment of North Korean troops in Ukraine “shows the desperation of Russia”, but also said it has “serious implications for European security”.
For that reason, he is calling on world leaders to “double down on shoring up our support for Ukraine”, which he described as his “top of my agenda” at the G20 summit.
Asked why he would expect US president-elect Donald Trump to honour anything agreed at this summit, the PM replied: “There are really important issues right here, right now when it comes to Ukraine that I think are well worth us [discussing], and it’s important that we do pursue.”
All Ukrainian regions will experience temporary restrictions on power consumption on Monday following Russia’s massive air strike on the country’s energy system, the national grid operator has said.
In a statement, Ukrenergo said temporary cut-offs would last from 6am until 10pm (local time), and that workers were repairing damages as quickly as possible.
The attack today was the largest on Ukraine since August.
It targeted energy infrastructure across Ukraine overnight and prompted emergency power cuts.
Russia’s defence ministry confirmed it launched a strike on facilities supplying Ukraine’s military-industrial complex, Russian news agencies reported.
By Stuart Ramsay, chief correspondent
If you know a teacher, or you are a teacher, you’ll understand that many in the profession consider their jobs one of the best in the world, while also acknowledging it can be one of the most stressful.
Teaching in a war zone takes it to another level on both fronts.
But imagine teaching in a war zone in say the London Underground or the Paris or New York metros?
Well, that’s exactly what is happening in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city – a city attacked by Russia on a constant basis.
In 2023, the authorities banned children from being taught in regular school buildings here because of the threat they were under from missile strikes.
So Kharkiv city and its education department started working on a plan.
That plan has concluded with the construction of six schools in six metro stations, teaching 4,800 children daily whose families haven’t fled the war.
Read Stuart Ramsay’s full eyewitness piece here…
Ukraine being given the green light to use long-range missiles against targets inside Russia could have “prevented or drastically reduced” Moscow’s massive attack on Ukraine, according to a global affairs analyst.
Michael Bociurkiw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said Joe Biden may now use a “window of opportunity” before he leaves office to “give Ukraine a bit more of an upper leg” against Russia.
“What happened today probably could have been either prevented or drastically reduced had President Biden given the okay for those Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles to be used to strike at the bases where these projectiles come from,” he told Sky News.
Mr Bociurkiw said it remains to be seen if Donald Trump will end up seeing Vladimir Putin as someone who “doesn’t want to deal” with him and give Ukraine “everything they’ve been asking for”.
“But I think the Biden administration may actually use this window of opportunity left to give Ukraine a bit more of an upper leg in terms of striking back at Russia,” he said.
Mr Bociurkiw, who is in Kyiv, said Russia’s overnight attack is “about as bad as it gets” and caused “a lot of panic” in the city.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk says “telephone diplomacy cannot replace real support” for Ukraine – in what appears to be a reference to the much-criticised phone call between the leaders of Germany and Russia on Friday.
“No one will stop Putin with phone calls. The attack last night, one of the biggest in this war, has proved that telephone diplomacy cannot replace real support from the whole West for Ukraine,” he wrote on X.
“The next weeks will be decisive, not only for the war itself, but also for our future.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reportedly condemned “Russia’s war of aggression” during the conversation on Friday and called on Vladimir Putin to end it by withdrawing troops.
He earlier defended the call after coming under fire over the weekend, and said it showed “little has changed in the Russian president’s views of the war” (see 12.27 post).
Ukraine’s military has released a video purporting to show a soldier shooting down a Russian missile with an air defence system.
The Ukrainian air force said the soldier, Nataliya Grabarchuk, downed the missile this morning in her “first combat launch”.
Grabarchuk was a pre-school teacher “in civilian life”, it said, adding that she has been a member of the anti-aircraft missile unit since 2021.
Donald Trump’s pick for director of US intelligence has previously been accused of amplifying Russian propaganda.
Tulsi Gabbard, who was announced for one of Trump’s key cabinet roles last week, once endorsed a claim by Moscow in 2022 that Ukraine was housing US-supported biological weapons labs.
Russia said Vladimir Putin had no choice but to invade Ukraine to protect his country from such weapons – but the US dismissed the claim as “absurd” propaganda and accused Moscow of seeking retroactive pretexts for the invasion.
The Ukrainian biolabs are in fact part of an international effort to control outbreaks and stop bioweapons.
Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who served in the Hawaii Army National Guard, said she wasn’t accusing the US or Ukraine of anything nefarious and was voicing concerns about protecting the labs.
When Russia launched its invasion in 2022, Gabbard also said the war could have been prevented had the US and the West recognised Moscow’s concerns about Ukraine possibly joining the NATO alliance.
UK foreign secretary David Lammy has condemned Russia’s “deplorable” strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid.
Posting to X, he said they show “Putin’s desire to weaken the resolve of a country he thought would be beaten in days”.
“It won’t work. We stand with Ukraine,” he said.
Russia’s massive attack on Ukraine is its way of sending a “clear message to Washington” that it cannot be defeated, an analyst has said.
Orysia Lutsevych, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, told Sky News that Moscow wants to show continued support for Ukraine in the war will come at a huge cost for the West.
“I think [the attacks are] to demonstrate, especially [to] president-elect Trump, that Russia cannot be defeated, that the cost for sustaining the war in Ukraine is too high for the West and the result will be futile,” she said.
“This is a clear message to Washington, but also it’s a clear message to Ukrainian people that Putin wants to freeze them in winter.”
On concerns over a possible “softening” of the Western stance towards Russia after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s call with Vladimir Putin, Ms Lutsevych said the Russian leader hasn’t achieved his war objectives and so his “best chance” is to undermine the West’s support for Kyiv.
“He is looking for the weakest link in this unity,” she said.
If Putin is awarded “even a partial success” in Ukraine, Europe and the rest of the world will be at risk from him being “emboldened” to go further, Ms Lutsevych said.
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