In a trip shrouded in secrecy, Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, and Lloyd Austin, the defence secretary, made a wartime journey yesterday to Kyiv, where the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, urged them to provide more aid
in his nation’s battle against Russian invaders.
Congress has already approved $13.6 billion in emergency spending related to the invasion, including for weapons, military supplies and one of the largest infusions of U.S. foreign aid to any country in the past decade.
Last week, President Biden announced an additional $800 million in military aid, including equipment to help combat Russia’s new focus on seizing eastern Ukraine.
Russia yesterday redoubled its assault on the eastern port city of Mariupol, where a steel plant held by Ukrainian
forces is under ferocious attack and where an estimated 120,000 people are surviving in what witnesses have described as barbaric conditions.
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In the second-round runoff of France’s election, Emmanuel Macron, the president, triumphed over Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, with a lead of about 17 percent points. In a solemn address, Macron said it was a victory for
“a more independent France and a stronger Europe.”
During the campaign, Le Pen was hostile to NATO, the U.S. and the E.U., as well as to the fundamental values that hold that no French citizens should be discriminated against because they are Muslim.
Jean-Yves Le Drian, the foreign minister, said the result of the election reflected “the mobilisation of French people for the maintenance of their values and against a narrow vision of France.”
Le Pen, who conceded defeat, bitterly criticised the “brutal and violent methods”
Russia launched a barrage of attacks against a military base in Ukraine yesterday, bringing the war 11 miles from the border with Poland. About 1,000 foreigners who had come to help Ukraine were believed to have been training at the base. “The entire sky was in flames...”
one witness said.
Western officials said the attack was not merely a geographic expansion of the Russian invasion, but also a shift of tactics in a war many already worried might metastasise into a larger European conflict.
Pentagon and NATO officials reiterated that
they did not intend to directly confront Russian forces in Ukraine. But they are sending military supplies, and Russia has warned that it regards those convoys as legitimate targets. The military base that was hit had been a hub for Western military troops to train