Ukraine’s Zelenskyy warns of dwindling air defense missiles
KYIV—Ukraine could run out of air defense missiles if Russia keeps up its intense long-range bombing campaign, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned in remarks aired on Saturday.The Ukrainian leader’s starkest warning to date of the deteriorating situation faced by his country’s air defenses follows weeks of Russian strikes on the energy system, towns and cities using a broad arsenal of missiles and drones.
“If they keep hitting (Ukraine) every day the way they have for the last month, we might run out of missiles, and the partners know it,” he said in an interview that aired on Ukrainian television.
Zelenskyy, who has been appealing to allies for weeks to rush in more air defenses, said that Ukraine had enough stockpiles to cope for the moment, but that it was already having to make difficult choices about what to protect.
He singled out in particular the need for Patriot air defense systems and said Ukraine needed 25 of them.
The sophisticated US air defense system has been vital during Russian attacks with ballistic and hypersonic missiles which can hit targets within a matter of minutes.His remarks followed a fresh spate of attacks that Ukrainian officials said killed civilians.
Death from the skyTwo Russian missile and drone strikes, one in the early hours of Saturday and a second in the afternoon, killed eight people and wounded at least 10 more people in northeastern Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city.
In the eastern region of Donetsk, artillery shelling killed four people in the village of Kurakhivka including a 38-year-old woman and her 16-year-old daughter, and a 25-year-old man in the village of Krasnohorivka was killed, while in Odesa in the south, a missile strike killed one civilian.
Ukraine’s largest private power company DTEK says the strikes had hit 80 percent of its generating capacity and the grid has introduced rolling blackouts to stabilize the system.The battlefield momentum has moved against Ukraine in recent months as Kyiv grappled with a slowdown in military assistance from the West and in particular from the United States.“The situation is difficult, but nevertheless stabilized,” he said. —REUTERS
