Ukraine updates: Kremlin hopes US Congress will block aid

French President Emmanuel Macron held a working dinner with Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Thursday ahead of an EU Summit on December 14-15.

Macron met Orban at the Elysee Palace to discuss "various aspects of European support for Ukraine" after Orban threatened to block further aid to Ukraine.

The European bloc wants to agree further financial support and discuss Ukraine's potential EU membership — but that could be blocked by Orban, who has retained close ties to Vladimir Putin despite Russia's invasion.

Macron's intervention follows Orban's comments that Ukraine should be dropped from the agenda in Brussels because "the obvious lack of consensus would inevitably lead to failure."

Orban has reluctantly agreed to EU support for Ukraine since February 2022 and has consistently attempted to water down sanctions on Moscow. 

The Ukrainian government on Thursday called on its citizens to reduce energy consumption amid Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure. 

"This afternoon, the enemy attacked one of the thermal power plants in the frontline zone," the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy said. 

"As a result of the shelling, equipment was seriously damaged. Two power units stopped working," the ministry added.  

"The Energy Ministry appeals to consumers to support power engineers by consuming electricity reasonably and economically, especially during peak load hours," the ministry said.  

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal also called on residents to save electricity amid cold weather conditions and emergency repairs.

"The government and power industry are now calling on everyone to reduce electricity consumption. From 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.," Shmyhal said on Telegram. 

Ukraine said Thursday that it has attempted to move its trucks across the Polish border via train.  

Polish haulers have blocked several Polish border crossings with Ukraine. The truckers are angered that "solidarity corridors" following Russia's invasion of Ukraine have allowed Ukrainian transport companies to gain what they see as an unfair competitive advantage.  

To get around the blockade, Ukraine said it is loading trains with its trucks and then sending them over the border.

"We have a loaded train at the crossing with Hrubiezow," Ukrainian Railways official Valery Tkachev said, according to the Interfax-Ukraine news agency. "We already have 23 boxcars loaded with trucks."

Videos circulated on social media showing Ukrainian trucks being transported on top of train cars. 

Ukraine has earlier decried the Polish truckers' blockade as "catastrophic" and said thousands of its truckers are stuck on the Polish side.   

Ukraine announced that it had signed an agreement with the United States to help move weapons production to Ukraine, as doubts hang over Western support for its defense against Russia's invasion.

"The memorandum sets localisation of the defense industry in Ukraine as one of the main priorities," a statement released by the Ukrainian presidency said.

"The document will facilitate the building of production facilities in our country to provide the armed forces with the necessary weapons, in particular in the areas of air defence, production of critical munitions, and repair and sustainment," it said.

Since the beginning of Russia's invasion, Ukraine has relied on Western weapons and ammunition to hold out against Russian forces. But after nearly two years of conflict, there are signs of growing weariness in Europe and the United States to provide more financial and military aid.

The United States issued new cyber-related sanctions on Thursday targeting two individuals in Russia, the Treasury Department's website showed.

The two Russians were Andrey Korinets and Ruslan Peretyatko.

Earlier on Thursday, the UK accused Russia of a cyberespionage campaign and imposed sanctions on Peretyatko, an FSB intelligence officer, and Korinets, a member of Star Blizzard cyber group, for involvement in the so-called spear-phishing operations. 

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida pledged $4.5 billion (€4.17 billion) to Ukraine, including $1 billion in humanitarian aid to help support the war-torn country's recovery effort in an online summit of leading industrial nations.

Kishida made the announcement late Wednesday in Tokyo while hosting his last Group of Seven virtual summit as this year's chairperson.

The $1 billion humanitarian and recovery aid includes funding for generators and other power supplies for the Ukrainian people to survive the winter, as well as measures to clear mines planted by Russia, the Foreign Ministry said. The remaining $3.5 billion includes funding for credit guarantees for World Bank loans to Ukraine.

"This is significant support for the recovery of Ukraine and our economy, said Japan stands firmly with Ukraine and our people," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his message posted on X, formerly Twitter.

Japan has donated more than $7 billion to Ukraine since the war started, mostly for humanitarian assistance, and military equipment limited to non-lethal weapons because of legal limitations under its pacifist constitution.

Ukraine's allies have drastically scaled back their pledges of new aid to the country, which have fallen to their lowest level since the start of the war, according to a Germany-based think tank.

"The dynamics of support to Ukraine have slowed," the Kiel Institute for the World Economy said, adding that new military, financial and humanitarian aid promised to Ukraine between August and October 2023 fell almost 90% from the same period in 2022, reaching its lowest point since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The Kiel Institute figures showed that newly committed aid between August and October 2023 came to just €2.11 billion ($2.27 billion), a drop of 87% year-on-year.

Of 42 donor countries tracked by the institute's study, only 20 had committed new aid packages to Ukraine in the last three months, the smallest share since the start of the war.

"Given the uncertainty over further US aid, Ukraine can only hope for the EU to finally pass its long-announced €50 billion support package," the institute said, adding that further delay would "clearly strengthen" Russia's hand.

The 27-member European Union is the biggest supplier of military aid to Ukraine, with Germany and Nordic countries particularly stepping in to fill the gap left by a divided US Congress. 

EU countries committed €780 million in heavy weapons to Ukraine between August and October, compared to €500 million in US assistance.

Russia said it arrested a Belarusian man for allegedly placing explosives on two trains on a key part of a Siberian railway near the Chinese border on Ukraine's orders.

The arrest came around a week after authorities reported traffic complications in a tunnel on the Baikal-Amur mainline, some 5,500 kilometers (3,400 miles) east of Moscow. 

"On the territory of the Omsk region, a citizen of Belarus born in 1971 was arrested, for being behind explosions on November 29 and 30 on two trains carrying oil products travelling ... along the routes of the Baikal-Amur railway line in the Buryatia region," Russia's FSB security service said.

FSB said the man's curator was a Lithuania-based Belarusian who it said worked for Ukrainian secret services. 

Ukrainian sources told Reuters and AFP that the operations were conducted by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) which wanted to disrupt railway lines in Siberia that Russia uses for military supplies.

The Kremlin said it hoped US lawmakers would continue to block White House requests for emergency aid for Ukraine amid an internal feud in Washington over immigration reforms.

"It is to be hoped that there remain enough people with sober minds among American congressmen," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

Republican senators earlier blocked $106 billion (€98 billion) in emergency aid primarily for Ukraine and Israel, as conservatives balked at the exclusion of immigration reforms they had demanded as part of the package.

Peskov accused the White House of attempting to "groom American senators" and trying to "scorch the money of American citizens in the furnace of the Ukrainian war."

The Kremlin has said the end of US weapons deliveries for Ukraine is a prerequisite for peace talks. Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed that Ukraine's military would collapse after a week without Western backing. 

US President Joe Biden has led the global coalition backing Kyiv, but support has been waning among Republicans in Congress. His administration has warned that it will run out of money for more Ukraine aid in weeks unless lawmakers act.

A driver was killed and grain infrastructure damaged by a Russian drone attack on Ukrainian grain infrastructure near the Danube River, the governor of the Odesa region said.

Governor Oleh Kiper reported that the drone attack lasted for over two hours overnight. He said that while most of the drones were shot down, some got through, damaging a storage building, an elevator and trucks.

Ukraine's Danube ports have become a key artery for the country's huge volumes of export grain since Russia began blockading the Black Sea after invading its neighbor in February 2022.

Moscow hit Danube port infrastructure with waves of drone attacks in August and September, but the latest overnight attack came after a recent lull.

Ukraine's air force said 18 Shahed drones were launched in total at the southern Odesa region and Khmelnytskyi region, which is in west Ukraine. Fifteen of the drones were shot down by air defense rocket systems and mobile fire groups, the air force said.

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