NATO summit begins in Washington: implications for Ukraine. Ukraine’s Security Service presents new evidence showing that Russia deliberately struck the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital with a Kh-101 cruise missile. The bodies of five more people were recovered from under the rubble in Kyiv’s Syrets neighborhood following Russia’s Monday attack.
NATO summit begins in Washington: implications for Ukraine
The three-day summit with leaders of NATO’s member countries begins Tuesday in Washington, D.C. The event will number 32 members for the first time since Sweden’s joining in March. Russia’s war against Ukraine is expected to dominate the agenda. The summit opens a day after one of Russia’s deadliest strikes on a number of Ukrainian cities, including the capital where a children’s hospital was hit.
The summit marks the 75th anniversary of NATO. The foundations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were officially laid down on April 4, 1949 with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, more popularly known as the Washington Treaty.
The summit is the last one for Jens Stoltenberg, who will step down later this year after a decade as NATO Secretary General. Mark Rutte, the outgoing Dutch prime minister, will take over NATO’s leadership on October 1.
Early this year, President Volodymyr Zelenskyi said he expects the upcoming NATO summit to provide specific steps to strengthen Ukraine’s air defenses and to send a clear signal on the intention to bring Ukraine into the Alliance.
Zelenskyi is in Washington for the summit. U.S. President Joe Biden will host an event with President Zelenskyi and nearly two dozen other Allies and partners who’ve signed bilateral security agreements with Ukraine on the sidelines of the NATO summit on Thursday. The NATO-Ukraine Council will also meet on Thursday, July 11.
According to media reports, NATO allies have agreed to fund military aid for Ukraine with 40 billion euros (USD 43.05 billion) next year. The financial pledge is part of a broader Ukraine package that NATO leaders will agree at the Washington summit.
Kyiv won’t get or a clear invitation or pathway toward membership at the coming NATO summit, various news titles anticipated ahead of the event.
The alliance will announce that it has agreed to set up a mission in Germany to coordinate aid of all kinds to Ukraine over the longer term, according to the New York Times. Because the mission will be under NATO’s auspices, it is designed to function even if Donald J. Trump, a sharp critic of the alliance and of aid to Ukraine, wins the U.S. presidency in November.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is also establishing a new command in Wiesbaden, Germany, to coordinate the provision of military equipment to Kyiv and the training of Ukrainian troops. Dubbed NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine, the operation will be staffed by nearly 700 U.S. and other allied personnel from across the 32-country alliance. It will take over much of a mission that has been run by the American military since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Wall Street Journal said.
NATO will station a senior civilian official in Kyiv, among a raft of new measures designed to shore up long-term support for Ukraine that are expected to be announced at the summit in Washington. The senior civilian official in Kyiv would focus on Ukraine’s longer-term military modernization requirements and nonmilitary support, linking to both the planned Wiesbaden command and NATO headquarters in Brussels.
Ukraine is expected to get “good news” in its quest for more air defense systems at the NATO summit, a senior U.S. State Department official told Reuters last week. “You’ve heard that the Ukrainians are keen to secure additional Patriots or similar systems. And I think we’ll have some additional good news for them on that front,” he said.
Ukraine’s Security Service presents new evidence showing Russia deliberately struck Okhmatdyt hospital with Kh-101 cruise missile
Ukraine’s Security Service said it had found an engine fragment of a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile at the site of a Monday attack on the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Security Service said its investigators had also found a fragment of a Kh-101 wing deployment mechanism, a fragment of a Kh-101 jamming unit, a middle part of the body of a Kh-101 cruise missile, a rear section fairing and a fragment of a Kh-101 cruise missile’s hydraulic unit, fragments of an engine casing of a Kh-101 cruise missile with the inventory and serial numbers (inside and outside respectively), images of which it released on Monday.
The Security Service said its experts’ “conclusions are unequivocal — it was a targeted attack” by Russia.
“This is evidenced not only by the missile wreckage found at the impact site, but also by the analysis of the flight path, the nature of the damage caused, as well as a large number of photographs and video footage,” the statement reads.
The findings confirming the Russian attack was deliberate and targeted include:
1) the destruction caused, which is typical of a 400-kilogram warhead of the Kh-101 missile (a two-story hospital building was completely destroyed, and the surrounding buildings sustained significant damage). The destruction could have in no way been caused by a NASAMS missile, whose warhead is approximately 20 times less powerful.
2) the proportions, shape and size of the missile captured in a video clip that is circulating on social media fully correspond to a Kh-101 missile, and, on the contrary, are not typical of air defense systems, including NASAMS. Attempts by the Russian propagandists to compare the missile in the video hitting the hospital several hundred meters away with the size of the building in the foreground is a cynical and meaningless manipulation.
3) the missile’s flight path is fully consistent with the characteristics of the Kh-101 (climb, or ‘hill’ before attacking the target and attack at an approximate 60-degree angle).
4) targeting of the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital by a Kh-101 air-launched missile was recorded by objective radar monitoring.
The strike on the Okhmatdyt clinic claimed the lives of two people and injured 32 others, according to Ukraine’s Interior Minister, Ihor Klymenko.
Ukraine’s Security Service qualified the incident as a war crime and opened proceedings on war crime charges.
Bodies of five more people recovered from under rubble in Kyiv’s Syrets neighborhood following Monday attack
The bodies of four more people — three women and a boy, were found Tuesday under the rubble of a residential building in the Shevchenkivskyi district of Kyiv, officials said, bringing the death toll in the single building to 12.
Late on Tuesday, the State Emergency Service said its rescue teams working on the site had recovered the body of a 17-year-old girl, bringing the death toll from the Russian missile attack on Kyiv on Monday to 33. Another 121 people were wounded.
Path to EU: Why Green Restoration is Essential for Ukraine. Ukraine in Flames #635
The environmental community proposes to plan the country’s post-war reconstruction on the basis of energy independence and climate security and to intensify the harmonization of national legislation with European legislation. Civil society organizations believe that the goal of the reconstruction of Ukraine should not be a return to the pre-war state, but a full-fledged development and integration into the European community on the basis of sustainable development and taking into account the European Green Course, which is also a requirement of the Copenhagen criteria for joining the EU. Watch Ukraine in Flames #635 to find out why Ukraine won’t be allowed into the EU without an environmental component in its recovery strategy.
Guests:
- Yulia Ovchynnykova, People’s Deputy of Ukraine, Member of the Committee of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on Environmental Policy and Nature Management
- Olena Kravchenko, Executive Director of the International Charity Organization “Ecology-Law-Human”
- Tamara Malkova, Coordinator of Working Group “Energy, Transport, Environment and Climate Change” of the Ukraine-EU Civil Society Platform