The top US defence official said that Russia had suffered significant military losses in Ukraine, including “a lot of its troops”, and that the Pentagon was working to ensure that Russia does not have the ability to “very quickly reproduce that capability”.

Speaking after a risky and secret visit to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, Lloyd J. Austin III, the US secretary of defence, said that there would be a more detailed discussion about what Ukraine would need to prevail against Russia at a meeting in Germany on Tuesday. “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree it cannot do the kind things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” he said.

In the two months since the start of the war, the Biden administration has steadily increased military assistance while at the same time imposing wider sanctions aimed at crippling the Russian economy. The assertion by the top US defence officials that America wants to degrade the Russian war machine reflected an increasingly emboldened approach from the Biden administration.

Austin, who made his comments during a brief news conference on the Polish-Ukrainian border, was joined by secretary of state Antony J. Blinken, who said that Russia had failed in its goal of destroying the Ukrainian state. US diplomats would soon be returning to Ukraine, he said, and he expected the embassy in Kyiv to reopen in a few weeks.
“Russia is failing,” he said. “Ukraine is succeeding.”

Power outage

Russian forces knocked out electricity for the entire province of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, local government officials said early on Monday, as fighting raged across the region.
A critical substation in the town of Kreminna was knocked offline, after weeks of intense fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces had already caused widespread damage to key infrastructure.

Kreminna, which had a population of around 18,000 before the war, sits on the Donets river. The river snakes its way through cities such as Rubizhne, Sieverodonetsk and Lysychansk that have become key battlegrounds as Russian forces press their offensive. In Luhansk — about half of which has been controlled by Russia-backed separatists since 2014 — the Russian advance has been grinding and costly. But Russian troops now control about 80 per cent of the region, according to Ukrainian officials.

Russians claimed to have seized Kreminna about a week ago, but control over territory along the front often goes back and forth, with the population caught in the middle. Many of those who lived in the region have fled, but there are about 70,000 people estimated to still be living in areas controlled by the Ukrainian government.

New York Times News Service