Ukraine can win war with right kind of arms: Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin

The United States said it believes Ukraine can win the war, given it has the right weapons.  “We believe that we can win, they can win if they have the right equipment, the right support,” Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said during his visit to Kyiv with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
 
Blinken said the US will reopen its embassy in Ukraine soon and that Russia had failed and Ukraine had succeeded in terms of “war aims”, and promised more military aid, hailing the fight against Russia’s invasion.
 
But Moscow’s ambassador to Washington told Russian state television that Russia had warned the US against sending more arms to Ukraine. “We stressed the unacceptability of this situation when the United States of America pours weapons into Ukraine, and we demanded an end to this practice,” Anatoly Antonov said.
 
Meanwhile, Blinken and Austin said the fact they were able to come to Kyiv was proof of Ukraine’s tenacity in forcing Moscow to abandon an assault on the capital last month.
 
US officials said Austin and Blinken pledged new assistance worth $713 million for Zelenskyy’s government and other countries in the region. An extra $322 million in military aid for Ukraine would take the total US security assistance since the invasion to about $3.7 billion, one official said.
 
It would also help Ukraine’s armed forces transition to more advanced weapons and air defence systems that were essentially Nato compatible, the official added.

Russia says it’s probing large oil depot fire

Russia said on Monday it would investigate the cause of a large fire that erupted in the early hours of the morning at an oil storage facility in the city of Bryansk 154 km northeast of the border with Ukraine.

Social media footage showed what sounded like two explosions.  Reuters