Kyiv, Ukraine: In the early hours of Wednesday, as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members assembled in Vilnius, Lithuania, Russia stepped up its assault on Ukraine.
“The movement of enemy UAVs has been recorded,” the Kyiv regional military administration wrote on Telegram. In the area, air defense is operational.
The attacks follow an overnight raid on Monday in which Russian drones were shot down by Ukraine’s air defense. Sergey Shoigu, the defense minister of Russia, had already threatened reprisal if the United States went ahead with its intentions to give Ukraine cluster munitions.
This came after months of debate within the Biden administration about whether to give Kyiv the contentious weapons that are outlawed by over 100 countries, including important US allies, as part of a new military aid package. The US confirmed last week that it will send cluster munitions to Ukraine.
The 31-member group made a final declaration at a summit in Lithuania, according to a joint statement released by NATO leaders at a summit in Vilnius, where member nations reaffirmed their support for Ukraine’s efforts to join the alliance.
“We fully support Ukraine’s right to choose its own security arrangements,” NATO allies stated in the joint statement. The future of Ukraine is in NATO. Reiterating our pledge from the Bucharest Summit in 2008 that Ukraine would join NATO, we acknowledge that the Membership Action Plan is no longer necessary as Ukraine moves closer to complete Euro-Atlantic integration.
The alliance’s allies highlighted that Ukraine has grown “increasingly interoperable and politically integrated” with it. The NATO allies declared that they will keep assisting Ukraine and monitoring its development through the modified yearly national program. The members of NATO also reaffirmed their criticism of Russia’s war and its “blatant violations of international law, the Charter of the United Nations, and OSCE commitments and principles.”
