Ukraine has asked its Western allies to speed up the supply of weapons and equipment as NATO defense ministers prepared to meet for a second day and Russia further intensified its monthslong effort to capture the eastern city of Bakhmut.
The appeal, by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other Ukrainian officials, comes as Russia’s new offensive gains steam in the eastern Donbas region. Ukraine’s General Staff said on February 15 that fighting was focused around not only Bakhmut, but also Lyman, Avdiyivka, and Kupyansk.
Zelenskiy warned that Russia was trying to lock in battlefield gains before more Western weaponry could arrive.
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“I can say with confidence that the basic trends remain unchanged. Together, Ukraine and its partners are doing everything to ensure that the terrorist state loses. And for it to happen faster,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address on February 14.
On the first day of a two-day meeting in Belgium, NATO defense ministers on February 14 again expressed reluctance to send fighter jets — something Ukrainian officials have repeatedly asked for.
The number of countries that have pledged to send tanks to Ukraine has grown to 11, General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference after the Brussels meetings; 22 countries have pledged to send infantry fighting vehicles, 16 are sending artillery and ammunition, and nine are sending air-defense systems.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged additional aid and weaponry but he said there would be no announcement on jets. And German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said jets were not the focus of Western deliberations for now.
“When the skies over Ukraine remain safe in the next three to four months, then you can talk about all other further steps,” Pistorius said on German television.
The most intense fighting at present is in the Donbas, around the city of Bakhmut, as well as to the north, near Kreminna, and to the south, near Vuhledar.
Russian forces have spent months trying to capture Bakhmut, which sits astride several major highways but whose strategic significance has been questioned by military analysts.
In recent weeks, Russian troops, including soldiers from the Wagner mercenary group, have made slow, incremental progress around Bakhmut; over the weekend, Wagner’s owner, St. Petersburg businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, claimed his troops had captured a small, important village on Bakhmut’s northern outskirts.
“Bakhmut will not be taken tomorrow, because there is heavy resistance and grinding, the meat grinder is working,” Prigozhin said in a statement released by his press service earlier. He described “fierce” fighting unfolding on “every street, every house, every stairwell.”
The worst fighting continues to be near Bakhmut, Milley said.
“I would describe it as a war of attrition. The Russians are suffering huge losses,” he said.
Milley also highlighted the fact that many of the Russian soldiers fighting in the Donbas are former prison inmates, recruited by Wagner to fight in exchange for early release from their sentences.
Russia is sending conscripts and prisoners “to imminent death” while losing “strategically, operationally, and tactically,” he said.
Russian forces also appear to have suffered major losses of men and equipment around Vuhledar, a town 150 kilometers southwest of Bakhmut, according to Ukrainian and Western officials and open-source reporting.
Meanwhile, researchers at Yale University in the United States said that Russia had relocated thousands of Ukrainian children to a network of sites in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine and in Russia.
The main goal of the effort is to “reeducate” the children to make them pro-Russian, the researchers said in the report released February 14.
