Latest developments:
U.S. President Joe Biden hosted Italian Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, Pope Francis' peace envoy, for talks about Vatican efforts to provide humanitarian aid in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his government is working to "preserve Ukraine's global role as a guarantor of food security, our maritime access to the global market, and jobs for Ukrainians in ports and in the agricultural industry" following Russia's withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative.
Ukrainian officials said Wednesday that Russian forces carried out airstrikes on the Odesa region in southern Ukraine for a second consecutive night.
Oleh Kiper, the regional governor, urged people to stay in shelters and said air defense systems were activated to repel the attacks.
After the first night of aerial attacks, which hit Odesa and nearby Mykolaiv, Russia said it was acting in retaliation for an attack Monday that damaged a key bridge linking Russia to the Crimean Peninsula.
Russia has used the bridge as a major supply route supporting its forces in their invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian defense ministry said in a statement Tuesday it targeted facilities involved in what it called “terrorist acts” carried out by seaborne drones, including a shipyard near Odesa and Ukrainian fuel depots.
The Odesa region is the site of multiple ports that were part of the Black Sea Grain Initiative brokered by the United Nations and Turkey to facilitate the export of Ukrainian grain to the world market. Russia withdrew from the deal earlier this week.
Ukrainian counteroffensive
It’s too early to judge the outcome of the seemingly slow-moving counteroffensive of Ukrainian forces against Russian strongholds in eastern and southern Ukraine, the top U.S. military officer said Tuesday.
So far, war analysts say Ukraine has retaken about 250 square kilometers of territory since early June, but Russia has maintained control of large expanses of land.
Still, General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon, “It is far from a failure, in my view. I think it is way too early to make that kind of call.”
“First of all, the Russians have had several months to put in a very complex defense,” Milley said. “It’s not quite connected, transform[ing] like World War I, but it’s not dissimilar from that either.”
Milley said Moscow’s forces had built “lots of complex minefields, Dragon’s Teeth [anti-tank obstacles], barbed-wire trenches.”
Milley said Russian “morale is low, and now recently because of the [Yevgeny] Prighozin mutiny [of Wagner Group troops], command and control is confusing at best. Significant casualties of their officer corps, so the Russian situation is not very good.”
He said “what the Ukrainians have, though, is a significant amount of combat power not yet committed. And I will not say what’s going to happen in the future, because that’s going to be a Ukrainian decision… Right now, they are preserving their combat power, and they are slowly and deliberately and steadily working their way through all these minefields.”
‘Going to do what it takes’
The U.S. military leader said the West’s coalition supporting Ukraine’s forces has trained 17 brigade combat teams and more than 63,000 troops, 15,000 of them by the U.S.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, “I’ve asked our [Western allies] to continue to dig deep into the military stocks because we’re going to do what it takes to support Ukraine’s sovereign right to live free today and for the future…. They continue to make progress on a cohesive training plan and to help some very eager Ukrainian pilots learn to fly fourth generation aircraft.”
Milley added, “The problem is control of the air space. The most effective and efficient and cost-effective way to do that right now in Ukraine is ground-to-air [missiles]. And that’s what they’ve been provided.”
“The casualties that Ukrainians are suffering in this offensive are not so much from Russian airpower but from minefields,” Milley said. “So, the problem to solve is minefields.”
Some information came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
…