Russian President Vladimir Putin has told a security council meeting via videoconference that gear provided for troops must be 'modern, convenient and efficient'. Photo / Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik via AP, File
Russian President Vladimir Putin has told a security council meeting via videoconference that gear provided for troops must be 'modern, convenient and efficient'. Photo / Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik via AP, File
Russian President Vladimir Putin has chaired a new committee tasked with boosting the delivery of weapons and supplies for his country’s troops in Ukraine.
Speaking during the inaugural session of the coordination council he created last week, Putin said Russia is facing “new serious challenges,” and needs to “gain higher tempo in all areas.”
Putin told the meeting’s participants via video link to make sure that gear provided for troops is “modern, convenient and efficient”.
Russian news reports have said many of the army reservists who were called up as part of a mobilisation ordered by Putin did not receive basic supplies such as medical kits and flak jackets and had to procure them on their own.
Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi speaks during a press conference with Speaker of the Croatian Parliament Gordan Jandrokovic in Zagreb, Croatia. Photo / AP
Russian authorities have acknowledged the deficiencies and vowed to quickly fix the flaws.
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has accused Russia and its president of acting “outside the circle of civilised human behaviour” during the war and pledged the United States and its allies will stand behind the Ukrainian people “until victory is won”.
“Eight months into Russia’s own provoked unjustified war against Ukraine, the deaths, displacements and destruction continue,” Pelosi said at a summit in Croatia of parliamentary speakers from some 40 countries. “In the last two weeks alone, Putin has launched a further campaign of horror, unleashing swarms of drones against cities visible from the streets, designed to terrify and to kill.”
The summit in Zagreb, Croatia, on Tuesday took place under the Crimea Platform, an initiative Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy launched last year to denounce Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
Putin last month illegally annexed four other regions of Ukraine.
The United States and key Western allies have accused Russia of using Iranian-made drones to attack civilians and power plants in Ukraine. Iran has denied it is supplying Russia with the explosive-laden missiles but the distinctive triangle-shaped drones have been seen in the skies over Ukrainian towns.
“Putin is also targeting and destroying Ukraine’s power stations seeking to deprive Ukrainians of heat and power as winter approaches,” Pelosi said. “Using rape, kidnapping and other atrocities, kidnapping of children, as a weapon of war, is outside the circle of civilised human behaviour. Attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime.”
Meanwhile, a senior Ukrainian official has asked citizens staying abroad not to return to Ukraine for the winter to conserve power from facilities Russian forces have heavily damaged.
Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk made the appeal on Ukrainian TV on Tuesday, saying, “We need to survive the winter, but, unfortunately, the networks will not survive” increased demand.
Vereshchuk said “the threat of shelling, cold and hunger remains” eight months after the Russian invasion forced millions of Ukrainians to flee their homes.
⚡️ Breaking:
Ukrainians who are now abroad should not return home until spring, - Irina Vereshchuk. pic.twitter.com/5AswS9jxMf
“To return now is again to expose yourself, your children, all your vulnerable relatives, who may be either sick or with limited mobility,” she said, urging citizens to return in the spring to help restore previously occupied regions that are again in Ukraine’s control.
Zelenskyy has said that Russian troops destroyed 30 per cent of Ukraine’s power plants. Ukraine is conducting rolling power outages for at least four hours a day.
The Kremlin has insisted that its warning of a purported Ukrainian plan to use a “dirty bomb” radioactive device should be taken seriously, and criticised the West for shrugging it off.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appears on screen to address during the First Parliamentary Summit of the International Crimea Platform in Zagreb. Photo / Damir Sencar, via AP
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Western dismissal of the Russian warning is “unacceptable in view of the seriousness of the danger that we have talked about.”
Speaking in Tuesday’s conference call with reporters, Peskov added that “we again emphasize the grave danger posed by the plans hatched by the Ukrainians.”
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told his British, French, Turkish and US counterparts Sunday that Ukrainian forces were preparing a “provocation” involving a radioactive device — a so-called dirty bomb. Britain, France, and the United States rejected that claim as “transparently false.”
A dirty bomb uses explosives to scatter radioactive waste in an effort to sow terror. Such weapons don’t cause the devastating destruction of a nuclear explosion, but could expose broad areas to radioactive contamination.
Ukraine’s state nuclear energy company says while Moscow has accused Kyiv of preparing to detonate a dirty bomb, the opposite may be true.
The Energoatom company said Tuesday that Russia’s military has carried out unauthorised work at the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. The secret construction work is going on at the dry spent fuel storage facility and could trigger a nuclear incident, the statement said.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine. Photo / Leo Correa, AP
There are 174 containers at the facility, each of which contains 24 assemblies of spent nuclear fuel, said Energoatom. Destruction of these containers as a result of an explosion would lead to a radiation accident and radiation contamination of several hundred square kilometers of the adjacent territory, it added.
The company called on the UN atomic agency to “assess provocative and threatening actions and statements of the Russian side as soon as possible.”
A dirty bomb uses explosives to scatter radioactive waste in an effort to sow terror. Such weapons don’t have the devastating destruction of a nuclear explosion but could expose broad areas to radioactive contamination.
