Russia pounds Ukraine with missiles after tank pledges

• Moscow rages at German and US announcements as Kyiv forces claim they downed 24 drones and 47 missiles

Russia sent Ukrainians racing for cover with a rush-hour missile barrage, killing at least one person on Thursday. This was a day after Kyiv secured Western pledges of modern battlefield tanks to try to push back the Russian invasion.

Moscow reacted with fury to the German and US announcements. The Kremlin said it saw the promised delivery of tanks as evidence of the growing “direct involvement” of the US and Europe in the 11-month-old conflict, something both deny.

The Ukrainian military said it had shot down all 24 drones sent overnight by Russia, including 15 around the capital, and 47 of 55 Russian missiles.

Air raid alarms sounded across the country as people headed for work. In the capital, crowds took cover in underground metro stations.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko said one person was killed and two wounded when a missile hit nonresidential buildings in the south of the city.

DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy producer, said it was conducting emergency power shutdowns in Kyiv and the surrounding region and also in the regions of Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk because of the imminent danger.

In Odesa, the Black Sea port designated a “World Heritage in Danger” site on Wednesday by the UN cultural agency Unesco, Russian missiles damaged

energy infrastructure, authorities said, just as French foreign minister Catherine Colonna was arriving for a visit.

Colonna was due to meet her Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, to discuss humanitarian and military aid and whether France might join its Nato allies in supplying Ukraine with tanks, in this case its Leclerc model.

Moscow and Kyiv, which have so far relied on Soviet-era T-72 tanks, are expected to mount new ground offensives in spring. Ukraine has been asking for hundreds of modern tanks to break Russian defensive lines and recapture occupied territory in the south and east.

“The key now is speed and volumes. Speed in training our forces, speed in supplying tanks to Ukraine, the numbers in tank support,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly video address on Wednesday. “We have to form such a ‘tank fist’, such a ‘fist of freedom’.”

Maintaining Kyiv’s drumbeat of requests, Zelensky said he had spoken to Nato secretarygeneral Jens Stoltenberg and asked for long-range missiles and aircraft.

Ukraine’s allies have already provided billions of dollars in military aid, including sophisticated US missile systems that have helped turn the tide of the war. US President Joe Biden said the 31 M1 Abrams tanks that Washington will provide posed “no offensive threat” to Russia.

The US has been wary of deploying the difficult-to-maintain Abrams tank, but changed tack so that Germany could be persuaded to pledge its more easily operated Leopards.

Germany will initially send 14 tanks from its inventory, which it said could be operational in three or four months, and will approve shipments by allied European states with the aim of equipping two battalions — in the region of 100 tanks.

The Leopard is a system that any Nato member can service, and crews and mechanics can be trained together, Ukrainian military expert Viktor Kevlyuk told Espreso TV.

“If we have been brought into this club by providing us with these vehicles, I would say our prospects look good.”

On Wednesday, Sergei Nechayev, Russia’s ambassador to Germany, called Berlin’s decision “extremely dangerous”, saying that it “takes the conflict to a new level of confrontation”.

Since invading Ukraine on February 24 last year, Russia has shifted from its claim that it is “denazifying” and “demilitarising” its neighbour. It is now saying it is confronting an aggressive and expansionist US-led Nato alliance.

Nikolai Patrushev, a close ally of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and secretary of his security council, was quoted as saying that “even with the end of the ‘hot phase’ of the conflict in Ukraine, the Anglo-Saxon world will not stop the proxy war against Russia and its allies”.

WAGNER MILITIA

The Russian invasion has killed thousands of civilians, forced millions from their homes and reduced cities to rubble while spurring Sweden and Russia’s neighbour Finland to apply to join Nato.

The heaviest fighting now is around Bakhmut, a town in eastern Ukraine with a pre-war population of 70,000 that has seen some of the bloodiest combat of the war.

Ukraine’s military said Russia was attacking “with the aim of capturing the entire Donetsk region, with no regard for its own casualties”.

The Russian-installed governor of Donetsk said on Wednesday that units of Russia’s Wagner contract militia were moving forward in Bakhmut, with fighting on the outskirts and in neighbourhoods recently held by Ukraine.