Fighting rages in eastern Ukraine

| December 13, 2022

Russian forces have pounded targets in eastern and southern Ukraine with missiles, drones and artillery, Ukraine’s General Staff says, while millions remained without power in sub-zero temperatures after further strikes on key infrastructure.

European Union foreign ministers agreed to put another 2 billion euros ($A3.1 billion) into a fund that has been used to pay for military support for Ukraine after it was largely depleted during almost 10 months of the war.

The EU ministers were also due to to discuss a ninth package of sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine while Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was set to address an online gathering of G7 leaders about the war.

There are no peace talks and no end in sight to the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, which Russia describes as a “special military operation” and Ukraine and its allies call an unprovoked act of aggression.

Russia does not yet see a “constructive” approach from the United States on the Ukraine conflict, RIA news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Vershinin as saying on Monday.

US President Joe Biden told Zelenskiy on Sunday his country was prioritising efforts to boost Ukraine’s air defences, the White House said. 

Zelenskiy said he had thanked Biden in the call for the “unprecedented defence and financial” help the US has provided.

Asked about security guarantees that Russia is seeking from NATO, Polish President Andrzej Duda said the alliance could guarantee that it would not treat Russia in the same way Russia is treating Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odessa on Monday resumed operations suspended after Russia used Iranian-made drones on Saturday to hit two energy facilities. 

Power is slowly being restored to 1.5 million people but the situation remains difficult, grid operator Ukrenergo said on Monday.

Zelenskiy said other areas experiencing “very difficult” conditions with power supplies included the capital Kyiv and Kyiv region and four regions in western Ukraine and Dnipropetrovsk region in the centre of the country.

The Kyiv region administration said 14 settlements there still had no power and 37 more were partially without power.

There were no reports of fresh strikes or blackouts overnight into Monday.

United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths arrived in Ukraine on Monday to see “the impact of the humanitarian response and new challenges that have arisen as infrastructure damage mounts amid freezing winter temperatures,” his office said.

In its daily update on the military situation, Ukraine’s General Staff said its forces had repelled Russian assaults on four settlements in the eastern Donetsk region and on eight settlements in the adjacent Luhansk region.

The regions are two of four in eastern and southern Ukraine that Russia claims to have annexed after “referendums” branded illegal by officials in Kyiv.

Ukraine has said Russian forces are suffering huge losses on the eastern front in brutal fighting that is also taking its toll on its own troops.

“There are days when there are many heavily wounded: four or five amputations at once,” Oleksii, a 35-year-old army doctor who declined to give his full name, told Reuters at a military hospital in eastern Ukraine.

At least two people were killed and five wounded in Kherson on Monday after what regional governor Yaroslav Yanushevych said was “massive shelling” by Russian forces of the southern city liberated by Ukrainian forces last month.

Many members of Russia’s private Wagner military group were killed when Ukraine targeted a hotel in the town of Kadiivka in Luhansk where they were based, the exiled governor of the Russian-occupied region, Serhiy Gaidai, said on Sunday.

Ukrainian forces had also hit a recreational centre used by Russian troops in Melitopol in the southeast, the city’s exiled mayor, Ivan Fedorov, said.

Reuters could not independently verify the latest battlefield accounts.