US Pledges Ukraine Embassy Reopening, Military Aid Amid Russian Warning

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KYIV (AP) — The United States is reopening its embassy in Ukraine, and President Joe Biden’s top diplomat and top defense official promised more military aid during his visit to kyiv, as Russia warned against arming its enemy and battles raged on. the East.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said their ability to reach Ukraine’s capital was proof of their tenacity in forcing Moscow to abandon an assault on the city. capital last month.

“In terms of Russia’s war goals, Russia has already failed and Ukraine has already succeeded,” Blinken said after the visit.

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said late on Monday that the crisis will end with a deal, but its content will depend on the military situation, criticizing kyiv for only mimicking negotiations.

Earlier, Russia’s ambassador to Washington told the United States to stop arms shipments, warning that large Western arms deliveries were inflaming the conflict.

The two-month war has killed or wounded thousands, reduced towns and cities to rubble and forced more than five million people to flee abroad as it drags on the biggest attack on a European state since 1945.

Russian forces were forced to withdraw from the outskirts of kyiv in the face of heavy resistance and have yet to capture any of the larger cities.

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The United States has pledged $713 million in new assistance to Ukraine and other countries in the region deemed potentially vulnerable to Russian threats. The White House also warned that further sanctions on Russia were likely.

An additional $322 million in military aid to Ukraine would bring the total US security assistance since the invasion began to about $3.7 billion, an official said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked the West on Monday, saying it had failed to divide Russian society and accused it of inciting kyiv to plan attacks on Russian journalists, in comments dismissed by Ukraine’s security service.

Russia was trying to disrupt kyiv’s allies’ arms supply by bombing its rail infrastructure, Ukraine’s military command said.

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Russia’s Defense Ministry later said its missiles destroyed six facilities feeding railways used to deliver foreign weapons to Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region.

Five train stations were attacked on Monday in central and western Ukraine and one person was killed, Ukrainian television said, citing the state-owned Ukrainian railway company.

Two people were injured in the shelling of a village in Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, the regional governor said on Monday night.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the reports.

Russia has always denied targeting civilians or intending to overthrow Ukraine’s government.

Moscow says it launched a “special military operation” on February 24 because the United States was using Ukraine to threaten Russia and protect Russian-speakers there. kyiv and its allies say they are pretexts for an invasion.

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NORMAL LIFE COMING BACK IN kyiv

Just a few weeks ago, kyiv was a frontline city under curfew and shelling, with tens of thousands of soldiers on the northern outskirts and residents sheltering from artillery in its metro stations.

Today, the nearest Russian soldiers are hundreds of kilometers away, and normal life is returning to the capital with visiting Western leaders and returning diplomats.

Blinken said the US diplomats would first go to the western city of Lviv and should be back in kyiv within weeks. Bridget Brink, now the US ambassador to Slovakia, will be the envoy.

But far from the capital, the war continues in eastern and southern Ukraine, where Russia launched a massive offensive last week.

Russian forces on Monday continued shelling and shelling the large Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, where fighters took refuge in a city devastated by a siege and shelling, Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said.

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Moscow said it was opening a humanitarian corridor to let civilians out of the plant, but kyiv said no deal had been reached and asked the United Nations to help find one as an “initiator and guarantor.”

The Russian Defense Ministry said that Ukraine had undermined evacuation efforts and that no one had left the steelworks through the humanitarian corridors on Monday.

Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyanskiy, told reporters that a ceasefire was not a good option and would only allow Ukrainian forces to regroup, although it was not his decision.

Ukraine’s General Staff also reported Russian shelling of its second-largest city, Kharkiv, in the northeast, as well as towns and villages in the south, but said the attacks on three settlements were repelled.

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Russia was investigating the cause of a huge fire that broke out in the early hours of the morning at an oil storage facility in the city of Bryansk, 54 km (96 miles) northeast of the Ukrainian border.

Neither side publicly linked the fire to the war.

Speaking in Moscow to Russia’s top prosecutors, Putin accused the West of inciting Ukraine to plan attacks on Russian journalists, and one such attempt was thwarted by the Federal Security Service (FSB).

The FSB service said it had arrested a group planning to kill TV show host Vladimir Solovyev, one of the most prominent voices in support of the invasion, at the behest of Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU).

The SBU dismissed the accusations as fantasies invented by Moscow.

(Additional reporting by Reuters journalists; writing by Peter Graff, Tomasz Janowski and Costas Pitas; editing by Mark Heinrich and Cynthia Osterm)