KIEV (AFP) –The Ukrainian Air Force said the country will soon have weapons to try to fend off attacks. The delivery of US-promised Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine is expected after Easter, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuri Ihnat said.
Mostly Orthodox Christian countries prepare to celebrate Easter on Sunday. In a speech on Ukrainian state television on Saturday, Ihnat declined to give an exact timetable for the arrival of the anti-missile system, but said the public would know “as soon as the first Russian plane is shot down.”
A group of 65 Ukrainian soldiers completed training last month at Fort Sill, a U.S. military post in Oklahoma, to learn more about how defensive missile systems can be used to detect and shoot down enemy aircraft. I’m back in Europe. Officials said at the time that Ukrainians would return to their country with Patriot missile batteries. This typically includes six mobile launchers, mobile radar, generators, and a mission control center.
Germany and the Netherlands have also pledged to provide Ukraine with a Patriot system.In addition, the SAMP/T missile defense system pledged by France and Italy “should be launched in Ukraine in the near future,” Ihnat said.
The Ukrainian military is looking to upgrade its anti-missile capabilities in preparation for a spring counteroffensive to retake Russian-held areas. Although more than a year of fighting had depleted arms stocks on both sides, Russian forces stepped up an eight-and-a-half-month campaign to capture the town of Bakhmut, the focus of the longest war to date.
Bakhmut and Sloviansk are about 45 kilometers apart in Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine. Rescuers in Sloviansk recovered two bodies from the rubble of a house hit by a rocket attack on Friday, state rescue services said. They also searched for five people who remained in the rubble of the apartment building on Saturday, as well as the occupants of three units reported missing, local authority chief Vadym Liakh said.
Separately, a 48-year-old woman and her 28-year-old daughter died on Saturday after Russian forces shelled the neighborhood of the city of Kherson, the local administration said via Telegram, the southern port city early in the war. It was occupied by Russian forces in 1944, but Ukrainian forces regained control in November, in one of Moscow’s most notable defeats on the battlefield.
A new law signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday would allow military officials to send draft communications electronically instead of delivering them in person, as Russia prepares for a protracted war in Ukraine. , the UK Defense Ministry said in an assessment on Saturday morning. According to British intelligence, a “uniform register of persons eligible for military service” will be digitally linked with other government services, and Russian authorities will “automatically limit employment rights and foreign travel to conscientious objection.
With the law only to come into force later this year, the UK Ministry of Defence said electronic notifications would not automatically signal a “big new wave of forced mobilization” but rather a “long-term approach to staffing”.
Meanwhile, Colonel Andrei Biryukov, in charge of mobilization, said on Saturday that 52,000 young Russian men had already received conscription orders under the country’s regular spring conscription, of which 21,000 had qualified for military service.
Biryukov expressed concern that the new electronic conscription law envisions a broader mobilization of reservists, as ordered by President Putin in September.
“I would like to emphasize that all military deferrals to civilians are valid, and electronic drafts will not be sent in bulk,” said Biryukov.
