POKROVSK, Ukraine — (AP) — The U.S. defense chief has urged Ukraine’s allies to “move forward at the speed of war” to bring more and heavier weapons to kyiv as Russian forces fired east and west. southern Ukraine and Russia cut off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria.
For a second day, explosions rocked the breakaway region of Transnistria on Tuesday in neighboring Moldova, destroying two powerful radio antennas. And a Russian missile hit a strategic rail bridge linking Ukraine’s Odessa port region with neighboring NATO member Romania, Ukrainian officials said.
Just across the border in Russia, an ammunition depot in the Belgorod region was on fire early Wednesday after several explosions were heard, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on the Telegram messaging app. Earlier this month, Russia said two Ukrainian helicopter gunships hit an oil depot in the same region and started a fire.
Russian state-controlled natural gas giant Gazprom said it cut off supplies to NATO members Poland and Bulgaria on Wednesday after they refused to pay for shipments in rubles. Poland has been a major gateway for arms deliveries to Ukraine and confirmed this week that it is sending tanks to the country.
Gazprom warned in a statement that if Poland and Bulgaria divert gas destined for other European customers, deliveries to Europe will be reduced to that amount.
Petrol prices in Europe have soared as much as 24% following the news. Dutch benchmark futures traded at one point around 125 euros per megawatt hour.
Fatih Birol, executive director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, tweeted Wednesday morning that his organization “stands firm with Poland.”
“Gazprom’s decision to completely cut off gas supplies to Poland is yet another sign of Russia’s politicization of existing agreements and will only accelerate European efforts to move away from Russian energy supplies,” he wrote.
Poland said it was well prepared after working for years to reduce its reliance on Russian energy. Poland also has ample natural gas storage and will soon benefit from the commissioning of two pipelines, said Rystad Energy analyst Emily McClain.
Bulgaria gets more than 90% of its gas from Russia, and officials said they were working to find other sources, such as Azerbaijan.
Both countries had rejected Russia’s demands to pay in rubles, as had almost all of Russia’s gas customers in Europe.
Two months into the fighting, Western weapons have helped Ukraine stave off Russia’s invasion, but the country’s leaders have said they need more support quickly.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said more help was on the way at a meeting Tuesday with officials from some 40 countries at the US air base in Ramstein, Germany. “We have to move at the speed of war,” Austin said.
He said he wanted officials to leave the meeting “with a common and transparent understanding of Ukraine’s short-term security requirements because we are going to continue to move heaven and earth to meet them.”
After unexpectedly fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces foiled Russia’s attempt to seize the Ukrainian capital, Moscow now says its focus is capturing the mostly Russian-speaking Donbas industrial area in eastern Ukraine.
In the town of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, people fleeing shelling lined up Tuesday to board a train headed to the far west of the country. One person was put on the train in a wheelchair and another on a stretcher.
The passengers took cats, dogs, some bags and boxes, and the memory of those who did not flee in time.
“We were in the basement, but my daughter did not survive and she got shrapnel on the doorstep” during Monday’s shelling, Mykola Kharchenko, 74, said. “We had to bury her in the garden near the pear tree.”
He said his village, Vremivka, was under heavy fire for four days and nearly destroyed. With tears in his eyes, Kharchenko said that he somehow held his own at home, but once he arrived at the train station he fell apart. In a fit of rage, he lashed out at Russia.
“Is this liberation? Who am I, a Russian speaker, from whom am I freeing myself? Whose? Of my daughter? From everything I’ve built all my life?
In the devastated southern port city of Mariupol, authorities said Russian forces hit the Azovstal steel plant with 35 airstrikes in 24 hours. The plant is the last known stronghold of Ukrainian fighters in the city. Some 1,000 civilians were said to be sheltering there with some 2,000 Ukrainian defenders.
Petro Andryushchenko, adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, said Russia was using heavy bunker bombs. He also accused Russian forces of bombing a route they had offered as an escape corridor from the steel mill.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region of Donbas, said on the Telegram messaging app that Russian forces “continue to deliberately fire on civilians and destroy critical infrastructure.”
Ukraine also said that Russian forces shelled Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, which is located in the north-east, on the outskirts of Donbas. But it is seen as key to Russia’s apparent attempt to encircle Ukrainian troops in Donbas from the north, east and south.
Ukrainian forces counterattacked in the Kherson region in the south.
Tuesday’s attack on the bridge near Odessa, along with a series of strikes at key railway stations the day before, seemed to signal a major change in Russia’s approach. So far Moscow has saved strategic bridges, perhaps hoping to preserve them for its own use in seizing Ukraine. But now it appears to be trying to thwart Ukraine’s efforts to move troops and supplies.
No injuries were reported in the attack on the bridge, and Ukraine’s military said repair work was underway.
The southern coast of Ukraine and Moldova have been tense since a senior Russian military official said last week that the Kremlin’s goal is to secure not only eastern Ukraine but the entire south, to open the way to Transnistria, a long and a narrow strip of land with some 470,000 people along the border with Ukraine, where some 1,500 Russian troops are based.
It was not clear who was behind the explosions in Transnistria, but the attacks raised fears that Russia is stirring up trouble to create a pretext to invade Transnistria or use the region as another staging point to attack Ukraine. .
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the blasts were carried out by Russia and were “designed to destabilize”, with the intention of showing Moldova what could happen if it supports Ukraine.
Austin, the US defense secretary, said the US was still investigating the explosions and trying to determine what was going on, but added: “We certainly don’t want to see any spillover” of the conflict.
With the potentially pivotal battle for the east underway, the US and its NATO allies they are struggling to deliver artillery and other heavy weapons in time to make a difference.
German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said her government will supply Gepard self-propelled armored anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has faced mounting pressure to send in heavy weapons such as tanks and other armored vehicles.
Austin noted that more than 30 allies and partners have joined the US in sending military aid to Ukraine and more than $5 billion worth of equipment has been pledged.
The US defense secretary said the war has weakened Russia’s military, adding: “We’d like to make sure, again, that they don’t have the same kind of ability to intimidate their neighbors that we saw at the beginning of this conflict.”
A senior Kremlin official, Nikolai Patrushev, warned that “the policies of the West and the kyiv regime controlled by it would only be the division of Ukraine into several states.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned that if the Western flow of weapons continues, talks aimed at ending the fighting will not produce any results.
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Gambrell reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Associated Press journalist Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, David Keyton in Kyiv, Oleksandr Stashevskyi in Chernobyl, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, and AP staff around the world contributed to this report.
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