Germany’s defense minister confirmed Friday that her country will supply Ukraine with seven powerful self-propelled howitzers to help defend itself against Russia.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6: The United States and Germany will send Ukraine armored fighting vehicles built respectively by the two countries to bolster Kiev in its ongoing conflict with Russia, the White House said Thursday.
The announcement was made in a statement about a telephone co
ELMAU, Germany, June 27: Leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) kicked off their three-day annual summit on Sunday in Schloss Elmau in south Germany's Bavarian Alps amid lower expectations and protests.
The summit will focus on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, climate and others, while the host dampened expectations.
The ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, especially further sanctions against Russia, will dominate the discussions at the summit of the world's major industrialized countries, as U.S. President Joe Biden said on Sunday morning that the G7 would impose a ban on imports of Russian gold.
In the first working session on Sunday, the leaders discussed global economic issues. All G7 countries are concerned about the crises that are currently being dealt with: falling growth rates in some countries, rising inflation, shortages of raw materials and disruption to supply chains, according to the host German Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
After the following working session in the afternoon, the G7 leaders launched a billion-dollar global infrastructure and investment initiative, dubbed the "Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment."
A German federal government source said on Saturday night that price caps of Russian oil will be discussed, a measure that envisages forcing Russia to sell oil to large buyers such as India at a significantly lower price in the future. The G7 countries are intensively discussing the issue and are "on the way to finding an agreement."
The source said that there will be a statement about the issue of the Russia-Ukraine conflict by the G7 leaders. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will deliver a speech via video during the summit.
Leaders will also address the food crisis caused by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. They will try to seek ways to unblock Ukraine's grain exports across the Black Sea and make financial pledges to help countries hardest hit by the crisis.
According to the policy priorities made by the host country Germany, G7 leaders will also address issues including climate change, by establishing a "climate club" put forward by Scholz.
Besides leaders of Germany, the United States, Japan, Canada, Britain, Italy, France and the European Union, leaders from India, Indonesia, South Africa, Senegal and Argentina have been invited to take part in the summit.
The West bloc is expected to take advantage of the G7 summit to try to persuade major developing countries to join their sanctions against Russia, experts said.
However, the host nation Germany tried to dampen the expectations of this summit. In his weekly podcast released on Saturday, Scholz said that although Elmau, the summit site, "lies in the mountains, we will certainly not move mountains there."
On Saturday, some 4,000 people marched in Munich against the G7 summit, with some protest groups accusing major western countries of triggering the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and of making the whole world bear the consequences of the conflict, including the food crisis.
Demonstrations continued and protestors got closer to the summit site on Sunday afternoon. More than 1,000 protestors attended the demonstrations, according to the organizers.
Climate crisis and the fear of an escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict are the main concerns of protestors. "We will not allow them to destroy our planet and our future," said a protestor at the rally.
JUNE 6: Ben Wallace said the M270 multiple-launch rocket system will help Ukraine defend itself against Russia.
The UK government has not confirmed how many weapons will be sent, but the BBC understands it will be three initially.
The decision was co-ordinated with the US, which announced last week it was also supplying a rocket system.
The move by the US has already angered Moscow and on Sunday Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to expand the list of targets Russia will attack in Ukraine if Western countries send long-range weapons to Kyiv.
The UK government said the Ukrainian military will be trained in how to use the launchers in the UK in the coming weeks.
Announcing the move, Mr Wallace said the UK was taking a leading role in supplying Ukrainian troops with the "vital weapons they need to defend their country from unprovoked invasion".
He said: "As Russia's tactics change, so must our support to Ukraine.
"These highly capable multiple-launch rocket systems will enable our Ukrainian friends to better protect themselves against the brutal use of long-range artillery, which Putin's forces have used indiscriminately to flatten cities."
Britain and America have led the way in supplying weapons to Ukraine, but giving it advanced long range rockets marks a significant shift, said the BBC's defence correspondent Jonathan Beale.
It is also a recognition that Ukraine is struggling to compete against Russia's vast artillery arsenal, he added.
The UK's multiple launch rocket system can fire 12 surface-to-surface missiles within a minute and can strike targets within 50 miles (80km) with pinpoint accuracy - far further than the artillery Ukraine currently possesses.
It is similar to the system the US is sending, the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).
Last week Washington said it would supply four HIMARS multiple rocket launchers to Ukraine - following receipt of guarantees they would be used for defensive purposes only and not to strike targets inside Russia.
In an interview on Russian state TV on Sunday, Mr Putin said: "In general, all this fuss about additional arms supplies, in my opinion, has only one goal - to drag out the armed conflict as long as possible."
The Russian leader said what the US was supplying was "nothing new".
But he warned against sending missiles with longer ranges: "If they are supplied, we will draw appropriate conclusions from this and use our weapons, of which we have enough, to strike at those targets that we are not striking yet."
The warning came as explosions shook parts of Kyiv on Sunday in the first assault on the capital city for weeks, while fierce fighting for control of key towns and cities in the eastern Donbas region continues.
Russia refocused its military efforts on the Donbas at the end of March after pulling back from the Kyiv region.
Some of the fiercest fighting is currently in the eastern city of Severodonetsk. Capturing the city would deliver the Luhansk region to Russian forces and their local separatist allies, who also control much of neighbouring Donetsk. The two regions form the heavily industrial Donbas.
On Sunday, Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said he had visited front-line troops in the eastern Donbas region to the city of Lysychansk and the town of Soledar.
Britain and the US have are among the leading nations giving arms to support Ukraine since Russia invaded in February.
The UK has also delivered more than 5,000 next generation light anti-tank weapons - known as Nlaw - which analysts believe have been critical to Ukraine driving back Russian ground assaults since the war began.
Other weapon systems delivered by the government include short-range Brimstone 1 missiles, Mastiff armoured vehicles and Starstreak missile air defence systems - with the overall military support to Ukraine costing £750m so far, the government said.
Several other countries have pledged to send advanced weapons to Ukraine. Germany has promised to send its most modern air defence system - the Iris-T - to enable Ukraine to shield an entire city from Russian air attacks.
Support for war crimes investigation
Meanwhile, a specialist team of lawyers and police officers will be offered to assist the chief prosecutor investigating alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine, the Justice Secretary Dominic Raab announced on Monday.
The offer will include a Metropolitan Police officer stationed in the International Criminal Court in The Hague, in the Netherlands - who will provide the ICC's prosecutor Karim Khan with greater access to British police and military expertise.
On top of this, seven lawyers experienced in international criminal law will be offered to help uncover evidence of war crimes committed in Ukraine and prosecute those responsible.
The ICC has already begun an investigation that may target senior Russian officials thought to be responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.
Atrocities and mass graves have been reported in towns and cities around Ukraine previously occupied by Russian forces - who withdrew from around the Kyiv and other areas they previously occupied to focus their offensive in the east.
Civilian massacres have been discovered in places like Bucha, a town near the Ukrainian capital, with people found dead in the street, having been allegedly bound, gagged and executed by retreating Russian soldiers.
Ukraine has so far reported 15,000 suspected war crimes, including Ukrainian women alleging being raped by Russian troops.
Some 600 suspects have been identified and 80 prosecutions have begun, with one tank commander already sentenced to life in prison in May, after being found guilty by a Kyiv court of shooting a 62-year-old civilian in the back.
The US and Germany pledged Wednesday to equip Ukraine with some of the advanced weapons it has long desired for shooting down aircraft and knocking out artillery, as Russian forces closed in on capturing a key city in the east
It was a busy day of international diplomacy, with several major summits that saw leaders from around the world displaying solidarity with Ukraine.
The Nato defensive alliance, as well as the EU and the G7 group of the world's richest nations held unprecedented emergency summits in Brussels.
Unity and support for Ukraine were the key themes, with leaders pledging military and humanitarian assistance.
Russia, meanwhile, accused the West of wanting the conflict to continue.
"The single most important thing is for us to stay unified and the world to continue to focus on what a brute [Vladimir Putin] is," US President Joe Biden told reporters.
"Putin has already crossed the red line into barbarism," UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.
One of the main takeaways of the day came from the Nato defensive alliance, which approved major increases of forces in Eastern Europe.
Four new battlegroups will be sent to Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania.
The group has never been more united which is "the opposite of what [Putin] intended", Mr Biden said.
World leaders also warned that if Russia were to use chemical or nuclear weapons they would be forced to respond. They weren't, however, willing to say what that response would look like.
Ukraine can win this war, Johnson says
One of those in Brussels today was Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who announced that the UK would send 6,000 missiles to Ukraine.
He also pledged £25m ($32m) in aid to help pay its soldiers' salaries.
"I think [Putin] had literally no idea that the Ukrainians were going to mount the resistance that they are," Mr Johnson told BBC Newsnight.
"He totally misunderstood what Ukraine is - and, far from extinguishing Ukraine as a nation, he's solidified it."
War in Ukraine: What Ukraine is getting right
One month into this invasion and so far, Ukraine has defied the odds. Outnumbered on almost every metric - in tanks, in troops, in aircraft - Ukraine's forces, reinforced by citizen volunteers, have in many places fought the Russian army to a standstill.
They have lost territory, especially in the south around Crimea, which was already occupied and annexed by Russia in 2014. But Moscow's original aim of quickly seizing the capital Kyiv and other major cities, forcing the government to resign, has manifestly failed.
The tide could still turn against Ukraine. Its forces are running dangerously low on the vital western-supplied anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles needed to fend off the advancing Russians.
Many of Ukraine's most battle-hardened regular forces in the east of the country are at risk of being surrounded, cut off and annihilated. And with a quarter of the nation's population having fled their homes, those that stay put risk seeing their cities turned into a dystopian wasteland by relentless Russian artillery and rocket fire.
Yet despite these factors, Ukraine's forces are outperforming Russia's in this war, on several levels. This week the Pentagon spokesman John Kirby praised them as defending parts of their country "very smartly, very nimbly, very creatively". So what exactly have been the secrets of their success?
1. Highly motivated
There is a wealth of difference between the morale of the two armies. Ukrainians are fighting for the very survival of their country as a sovereign nation, appalled at President Putin's eve-of-war speech in which he said Ukraine was basically just an artificial Russian creation.
Ukrainians have rallied behind their government and their president. This has resulted in citizens with no prior military experience readily taking up arms to defend their towns and cities despite the overwhelming Russian firepower facing them.
"This is how people fight for their very existence," says Brigadier Tom Foulkes, who spent 35 years as a British Army officer in Germany during the Cold War. "This is how they defend their homeland and their families. Their courage is both shocking and splendid."
In practice this has freed up Ukrainian soldiers to go and fight on the front line, knowing their cities have defence in depth.
By contrast, many of the Russian soldiers sent to fight in Ukraine are conscripts just out of school, bewildered and confused at finding themselves in a war zone when they thought they were just going on an exercise.
Most had little or no battle preparation for the ferocity of the fighting they have encountered. There have been reports of desertions, food shortages and looting.
2. Command and control
Early expectations of a devastating Russian cyber attack, knocking out Ukraine's communications, did not materialise. Instead, Ukraine has somehow managed to maintain effective co-ordination over several battlefronts, even where it has lost ground.
Its government has stayed put in Kyiv and remained highly visible, with even the deputy prime minister dressed in a utilitarian khaki T-shirt as she addresses the nation against a backdrop of government insignia.
The Russian army, by contrast, does not appear to have any kind of unified leadership, with little co-ordination between its separate battlefronts.
This is likely to have had a negative effect on Russian military morale. It has been suggested the reported deaths of at least five Russian generals is partly a result of their having to get close to the fighting to dislodge their troops from getting bogged down.
At the level of Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs), ie the corporals and the sergeants, Russian military doctrine allows for almost no initiative, with these junior ranks always waiting for orders from above.
Prof Michael Clarke, a military expert at King's College London, says Russian NCOs are beset with corruption and inefficiency and are deeply unpopular with those they command.
3. Sound tactics
Ukraine's forces are heavily outnumbered and yet they have made much better use of the ground and their weapons than the invading Russians.
Whereas the Russians have tended to concentrate their forces in slow, heavy armoured columns, often with vehicles bunched up close together, the Ukrainians have successfully conducted finely-tuned hit-and-run raids, sneaking up and firing off an anti-tank missile, then vanishing before the Russians can return fire.
Prior to the invasion, Nato trainers from the US, UK and Canada spent long periods in Ukraine, bringing its forces up to speed in defensive warfare and instructing them on how to make best use of state-of-the-art missile systems such as the Javelin or the Swedish-designed NLAW anti-tank weapon or the latest version of the Stinger anti-aircraft missile.
"The Ukrainians have been much cleverer than the Russians", says Prof Clarke, "because they've fought something much closer to a combined arms operation which the Russians haven't". By this he means they have made full use of all the military tools at their disposal, such as drones, artillery, infantry, tanks and electronic warfare.
When combined together, the sum of all these different aspects of warfare can create an exponential effect greater than the sum of its parts.
Another military strategist, Justin Crump, who runs the intelligence consultancy Sibylline, says Ukrainians have been particularly adept at seeking out the vulnerable points in Russian formations and hitting them hard. "Ukraine has made use of highly effective tactics", he says, including targeting Russian weak points such as supply convoys, using Nato-supplied weapon systems to good effect against precision targets and improvising where required.
While it is hard to get an accurate picture of casualty figures, even the more conservative estimates made by the Pentagon put Russian combat deaths at more than 7,000. That is nearly half as many men as the Soviets lost in 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan and we are only a month into this war.
Brig Tom Foulkes also has an explanation as to why so many Russian generals are getting killed on the front line: "This sounds to me like a deliberate and highly successful sniper campaign which could degrade the Russian command structures."
4. The Info War
And then there is the information war. Ukraine is winning this hands-down in most of the world - although not in Russia where the Kremlin still controls access to most of the media.
"Ukraine has mobilised the information sphere to tremendous domestic and international advantage", says Justin Crump. "This has come from the top down, aided by (President) Zelensky's formidable media savvy."
It's a view echoed by Dr Ruth Deyermond, senior lecturer in post-Soviet studies at Kings College London. "Clearly the Ukrainian government has been very successful in controlling the narrative about the war, certainly for the wider world," she says. "What the conflict has done for Ukraine's international reputation is absolutely remarkable."
But right now, one month into this desperate life-and-death struggle on Europe's eastern borders, that may still not be enough to salvage Ukraine.
The numerical might of the Russian army, for all its shortcomings, is not in Ukraine's favour. If somehow the supply of defensive weapons systems from the West dries up then there could only be so much longer this beleaguered nation can hold out.
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