Washington - U.S. announced on Friday that it will provide Ukraine with $820 million in new military aid as the Russian airstrike on residential areas killed at least 21 people yesterday in the small town of Serhiivka, near the Ukrainian port of Odesa, a day after the withdrawal of Moscow’s forces from an island in the Black Sea had seemed to ease the threat to the city.
United States is sending Ukraine two NASAMS surface-to-air missile systems, four additional counter-artillery radars and up to 150,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition as part of its latest weapons packages for Ukraine, the Pentagon said.
"Ukrainians continue to face a brutality highlighted once again this week by an attack that struck a shopping mall filled with civilians. They continue to fight for their country, and the United States continues to stand by them and their just cause," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement about the assistance.
In all, the U.S. has committed more than $8.8 billion in weapons and military training to Ukraine, whose leaders have sought more help from Western allies to repel larger and heavily equipped Russian forces. About $7 billion of that aid has been announced since Russia’s February invasion.
“We are going to support Ukraine as long as it takes,” President Joe Biden said this week at a press conference during the NATO summit in Madrid.
Much of the aid formally announced Friday will take weeks or months to reach Ukraine.
The latest U.S. aid is meant to bolster Ukraine as it confronts heavy pounding by Russian artillery.
A U.S. defense official said Friday in Washington that Russian forces appeared to use an anti-ship missile in the airstrike on Monday at the Kremenchuk shopping mall that killed at least 19 people.
Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy noted that as in Monday’s shopping mall attack in Kremenchuk, Russian forces on Friday appeared to use anti-ship missiles to hit Serhiivka.
“These missiles, Kh-22, were designed to destroy aircraft carriers and other large warships, and the Russian army used them against an ordinary nine-story building with ordinary civilian people,” he said at a news conference Friday.
Twenty-one people, including an 11-year-old boy, his mother and the 42-year-old coach of a children’s soccer team, were killed and 38 others, including six children and a pregnant woman, were hospitalized, Ukrainian officials reported. Most of the victims were in the apartment building.
Ukraine’s presidential office said Russian strikes in the past 24 hours also killed civilians in eastern Ukraine — four in the northeastern Kharkiv region and another four in Donetsk province.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pressed on with his campaign to obtain support from Latin America with calls Friday to the leaders of Argentina and Chile.
The conversations with Alberto Fernández of Argentina and Gabriel Boric of Chile came a little more than two weeks after Zelenskyy spoke with Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso and Guatemalans President Alejandro Giammattei.
-AP/Reuters