Since Kiev’s forces advanced against invading troops in eastern and southern Ukraine, Russia has repeatedly dropped missiles and explosive drones on Ukrainian infrastructure. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that Russia’s campaign against Ukraine’s energy grid has left about 4.5 million people without power. “President (Vladimir) Putin seems to have decided that if he can’t take Ukraine by force, he’s going to try to freeze it and subjugate it,” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Friday after a meeting of G7 foreign ministers in Germany. Working session at the G7 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, at the Town Hall in Muenster, Germany on 4 November 2022 [Bernd Lauter/Pool/Reuters] The West has pledged to help Ukraine rebuild after the damage caused by Moscow’s attacks. Top diplomats from the rich nations club agreed on a structure to channel aid to Ukraine to replace infrastructure damaged by Russia after two days of talks in Muenster. The US, which has already committed more than $18.2 billion in security aid to Ukraine since the invasion began in February, is also considering options to deal with the damage. The Pentagon announced Friday that the U.S. is sending Ukraine $400 million in additional military aid and establishing a security assistance headquarters in Germany to oversee arms transfers and military training for Ukraine The aid also includes contracts for 1,100 Phoenix Ghost drones, funding to refurbish 45 tanks and an additional 40 riverboats. The Phoenix Ghost drone is an armed “kamikaze drone” that explodes on contact with its target. US President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met with Zelensky in Kyiv on Friday to confirm US support for Ukraine. Sullivan told a news conference in Kyiv that Ukraine was “in dire need of air defense at this critical time.”
“Deportations”
As an imminent Ukrainian offensive in the south looms, Moscow has continued to evacuate civilians from the Kherson region, with Putin saying residents should be “moved away” from danger zones. The Russian military said “more than 5,000 civilians” were being driven across the Dnieper River each day, showing footage of soldiers directing queues of cars into flotillas passing on the river’s east bank. Al Jazeera was unable to independently verify the claims. Moscow forces began urging tens of thousands of civilians to leave Kherson in mid-October, vowing to turn the region’s main city of the same name into a fortress. Civilians evacuated from Ukraine’s Russian-controlled Kherson region get off a bus as they arrive at a local train station in the Crimean town of Dzhankoi [Alexey Pavlishak/Reuters] Kyiv has likened the withdrawals to Soviet-style “displacements” of its people. “Those who live in Kherson should be moved away from dangerous battle zones,” Putin said in Red Square as he marked Russian Unity Day, a patriotic holiday. “The civilian population should not suffer from shelling, attack, counter-attack or other similar things,” he said. A resident of Kherson told the Associated Press news agency that Russian soldiers are moving into empty apartments. Russian military personnel went door-to-door, checked title deeds and forced tenants to leave immediately if they could not prove ownership of the apartments, he said. “They are forcing the townspeople to evacuate and then Russian soldiers are moving into liberated apartments across Kherson,” said the resident, who spoke on the condition that only his first name – Konstantin – be used for security reasons. “It is obvious that they are preparing to fight the Ukrainian army in the city.” The spokeswoman for Ukraine’s southern army, Natalia Humeniuk, told Ukrainian television that some Russian servicemen were disguising themselves as civilians. The claims could not be independently verified.
