Published: 02:59 PM, 16 March 2022
US steps up aid to Ukraine as pressure builds to halt Russia
The United States is set to unveil a fresh
round of security assistance to Ukraine Wednesday, a White House official
said, as Western leaders faced mounting pressure to stop Russia's bombardment
of civilians and peace talks made halting progress.
The official said President Joe Biden will on Wednesday unveil another $800
million worth of military aid, expected to include more of the anti-tank and
anti-aircraft missiles that have helped slow Russia's three-week-old invasion
to a crawl.
The package will bring "the total (aid) announced in the last week alone to
$1 billion," said the official.
The move will coincide with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's
landmark virtual address to the US Congress -- when he is expected to
intensify pleas for NATO allies to intervene directly to stop Russian
attacks.
In a late-night video message, Zelensky urged his beleaguered compatriots
to fight on against Russia's vastly larger military, even as he suggested the
conflict would end in a negotiated settlement.
"All wars end with an agreement," he said, pointing to a "difficult" but
"important" ongoing round of talks between representatives from Kyiv and
Moscow.
"Meetings continue," he added. "As I am told, positions during the talks
now sound more realistic. But we still need time, so the decisions are made
in the interest of Ukraine."
Recent days have seen an uptick in Russian strikes on civilian targets,
including in Kyiv and the besieged port city of Mariupol where there is a
critical lack of food, water and medicine.
Some 20,000 residents of the southern city have been allowed to leave, but
exhausted, shivering evacuees speak of harrowing escape journeys and rotting
corpses littering the streets.
One of them, Mykola, who asked not to give his full name, drove his wife
and two young children through a minefield to escape and to avoid Russian
checkpoints.
"This is the first time I have been able to breathe in weeks," he said.
The conflict has already sent more than three million Ukrainians fleeing
across the border, and a peaceful resolution still seems beyond reach.
On Tuesday Russian President Vladimir Putin's military launched a series of
strikes on Kyiv that killed four people.
The attack caused a fire that swept through one 16-storey housing block.
"At 4:20 am everything was very thunderous, crackling. I got up, my
daughter ran to me with a question: 'Are you alive?'," Lyubov Gura, 73, told
AFP.
