Ukraine updates: Zelenskyy to attend Ramstein assembly

A meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group is scheduled to take place at the US military base in Ramstein in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. 

Defense ministers and senior military officials will meet from 9:30 a.m. local time (0730 GMT) at the invitation of US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will attend, according to media reports. A government spokesman in Berlin said Zelenskyy would also have a one-on-one meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Frankfurt am Main in the afternoon.

At the Ramstein meeting, which will also be attended by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, Zelenskyy is expected personally to ask the allies for more weapons to counter Russia. The focus would be on long-range missiles and more air defenses. 

London has already announced that the UK will send 650 new special missile systems to Ukraine to strengthen its air defenses.

The US unveiled charges against five members of Russia’s military intelligence agency on Thursday.

The US Department of Justice accused five officers of the Russian agency, known as the GRU, of engaging in “destructive” computer attacks on civilian computer systems in Ukraine and around the world.

The five officers, along with a civilian who was already under indictment for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, allegedly “engaged in a conspiracy to hack into, exfiltrate data from, leak information obtained from and destroy computer systems associated with the Ukrainian government in advance of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

Ukrainian government systems and data were targeted, as well as countries that supported Ukraine, including the US and 25 other NATO countries, the Justice Department said.

The US is offering a reward of up to $10 million (€9 million) for information about the defendants.

Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s southern Kursk region is working and there have been no Russian advances in a key sector of the eastern front for six days, Ukrainian top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said in an interview broadcast by CNN on Thursday.

“Over the last six days, the enemy hasn’t advanced a single meter in the Pokrovsk direction. In other words, our strategy is working,” he said.

The Kursk incursion, he said, had “significantly improved the morale of not only the military but the entire Ukrainian population.”

Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his nightly video address, said Ukrainian troops were holding their positions in Kursk “and with each day of the operation we are proving to the world that Russia can lose this war.”

dh/sms (AP, AFP, dpa, Reuters)