KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The German president arrived in Kiev on Tuesday for his first visit to Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion.
“It was important for me to send a signal of solidarity to the Ukrainians at this stage of air strikes with drones, cruise missiles and rockets,” President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said after arriving.
Eight months of crackdowns by Kremlin forces have destroyed homes, public buildings and the power grid. The World Bank estimates Ukraine’s damage so far at 350 billion euros ($345 billion).
The German president, whose position is largely ceremonial, arrived in Ukraine on his third attempt.
He had planned to visit the country with his Polish and Baltic counterparts in April, but said his presence was “apparently… undesirable in Kiev.” Steinmeier was criticized in Ukraine for his alleged rapprochement with Russia during his tenure as Germany’s foreign minister.
Last week, a planned trip was delayed due to safety concerns.
Steinmeier’s visit comes as Ukrainians prepare for less electricity this winter, following a persistent Russian dam to their infrastructure in the past few weeks.
Citizens in the southern city of Mykolaiv lined up for water and essential supplies on Tuesday as Ukrainian forces advanced towards the nearby Russian-occupied city of Kherson.
Meanwhile in Berlin, European Union leaders gathered experts to begin work on a “new Marshall Plan” for the future reconstruction of Ukraine – a reference to the US-sponsored plan that helped revive the economies of Western Europe after the Second World War.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the meeting was aimed at discussing “how to ensure and sustain the financing of the recovery, reconstruction and modernization of Ukraine in the coming years and decades”.
Scholz, who co-hosted the meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, said she was “looking for nothing less than to create a new Marshall Plan for the 21st century – a generational task that must begin now”.
Even so, one of Moscow’s allies on Tuesday urged Russia to increase the speed and scale of Ukraine’s destruction.
Chechnya’s regional leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, who sent troops from the region to fight in Ukraine, urged Moscow to wipe all cities off the map in retaliation for Ukraine’s bombardment of Russian territory. Authorities in Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions, on the Ukrainian border, have repeatedly reported that Ukrainian shelling damaged infrastructure and residential buildings.
“Our response has been very poor,” Kadyrov said in a statement posted on the messaging app channel. “If a bullet lands in our area, all cities must be wiped out from Earth so that they never think they can shoot at us.”
Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials tried to allay fears about Russia using Iranian drones to strike the country’s infrastructure, claiming increased success in shooting them down.
Ukrainian forces shot down Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s intelligence service, said on Monday that more than two-thirds of the approximately 330 Shahed planes Russia had fired through Saturday. Budanov said that the Russian military has ordered about 1,700 different types of drones and has launched a second batch of about 300 Shahed.
Although Russia and Iran deny the use of Iranian-made drones, the distinctive triangle-shaped Shahed-136s rain down on civilians in Kiev and elsewhere.
The UK’s Ministry of Defense has said that Russia will use large numbers of drones to try to penetrate the increasingly effective Ukrainian air defense “to replace the increasingly scarce Russian-made long-range precision weapons”.
Russia’s “artillery ammunition is running low,” the British report said on Tuesday.
The Institute for War Studies in Washington added that “the slower pace of Russian air, missile and drone strikes likely reflects declining stocks of missiles and drones and the limited effectiveness of attacks in achieving Russian strategic military targets.”
Kyiv also says it needs more war material.
“We need more weapons, more ammunition to win this war,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told reporters in Berlin. “We need tanks from our partners, from all our partners; We need heavy armored vehicles, additional artillery units, howitzers.”
At least seven civilians were killed and three others injured in Russia’s latest shelling in the eastern Donetsk region, although attacks have waned, the Ukrainian presidential office said on Tuesday.
The attacks came as the Russians suppressed their attacks on the strategically placed towns of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, as well as bombarded other areas in the Donetsk region, part of Ukraine’s industrial center, Donbas.
Ukrainian guerrillas reportedly staged multiple explosions in a Russian-held southern city.
According to Melitopol mayor Ivan Fedorov, a car bomb exploded on Tuesday near an office building that houses the headquarters of Russia’s top security agency, the Federal Security Service, and a local television company.
The city’s Moscow-appointed Melitopol administration said five people were injured in the explosion.
Melitopol is located in the Zaporizhzhia region, part of which was captured by the Russian army at the beginning of the invasion. It was illegally annexed by Russia, along with three other regions of Ukraine, last month.
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