Kyiv ups call for air defences as Trump warns aid to Ukraine could be cut 

Ukraine’s president has sharply raised his demand for air defence systems, highlighting how much Russia has intensified the air war in recent months.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday said Ukraine needed a dozen additional Patriot systems to insulate its economy from the war.

“Ten or twelve additional Patriot systems for Ukraine will ensure [that]… no [glide bombs], no missiles, any ballistic missile etc. will be able to hit the civilian infrastructure of Ukraine, the energy sector, our hospitals, schools, universities,” Zelenskyy posted on the Telegram messaging app.

“People will return to normal life, and from abroad too. Children will go to schools, universities. The economy will work.”

In April Zelenskyy had said Ukraine needed a minimum of seven Patriot systems to provide air cover, but Russia has since raised the number of missiles, drones and huge glide bombs launched against Ukraine.

Last week, Zelenskyy said, Russia used almost 500 glide bombs, whose warhead ranges from 250kg (550lbs) to three tonnes, more than 400 strike drones, and almost 20 missiles of various types against Ukraine’s front lines and civilian infrastructure.

“This daily terror and this war cannot remain the problem of one people,” he said.

Last June, the United States prioritised delivery of newly built Patriot systems to Ukraine, putting its original customers on a delayed delivery timeline. During the NATO summit in July, partners agreed to provide Ukraine with five additional Patriot systems.

Zelenskyy has said much more military help is needed if Ukraine is to wrest back control of its skies and immunise its civilian population against Russia’s campaign.

In recent days, he said the first five operational Danish F-16s were already helping to shoot down incoming missiles, while a second batch of Danish F-16s arrived in Ukraine on Sunday. More are expected from Norway and the Netherlands in 2025, and Zelenskyy is in talks with French President Emmanuel Macron to speed up the delivery of Mirage jets early in the year.

A second plank of Zelenskyy’s strategy in the air war has been counterattacking Russia using long-range unmanned aerial vehicles.

On Wednesday, Ukraine’s general staff said their drones had struck a Russian oil depot in Bryansk, which they described as “a loading point of the Druzhba oil pipeline, the main function of which is the reception, storage, distribution and shipment of diesel fuel to tanker trucks and rail transport. It is actively used to supply the Russian occupation army.”

On Friday, Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umyerov said Ukraine would build more than 30,000 deep strike drones next year, calling them part of “a techno-army”.

Ukraine has already unveiled the Palyanytsia drone-missile, capable of travelling hundreds of kilometres. On Saturday Zelenskyy revealed that the Ukrainian-built, 700km-range (435-mile) Peklo drone-missile had entered mass production, and the first batch had been delivered to the armed forces.

These weapons are part of a domestic defence industry Ukraine has been building up for the past year. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense said it had licensed 120 new weapons in November alone, 90 percent of them of Ukrainian design.

This industrial buildup, along with a ramping up of capacity in Europe’s munitions factories, may have made a difference on the front lines.

Dmitry Voloshyn, a spokesman for the Khortytsia group of forces in Donetsk, said Ukraine had reduced Russia’s artillery advantage from 1:5 at the beginning of the war to 1:3.

Not everyone agrees.

“I think 1:3 is the [artillery] ratio in some areas where Russians are not advancing, but in areas where the Russians have the firepower to support operations it’s 6:1,” Oleksandr Danylyuk, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told Al Jazeera.

But where Ukraine cares to become as autonomous as possible is in long-range weapons, to avoid the usage restrictions that encumber Western missiles.

Even though US President Joe Biden last month allowed the use of US ATACMS missiles up to 300km (185 miles) inside Russia, their availability is an issue. The United Kingdom and France have bolstered stocks somewhat with their 200km-range (125-mile) Storm Shadow, but Germany has refused to provide any of its 600 Taurus missiles which have a 500km range (310 miles) – a policy with which the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) disagrees.

“By imposing such range restrictions, we are effectively compelling you to fight with one hand tied behind your back,” CDU leader Friedrich Merz said during a visit to Kyiv on Monday.

On Saturday, Macron set up a trilateral meeting in Paris with Zelenskyy and US President-elect Donald Trump, who pushed Zelenskyy towards declaring a ceasefire but offered no security guarantees.

The next day, Trump told NBC in an interview that he was open to reducing military aid to Ukraine and pulling the US out of NATO.

“Possibly,” he said, when asked if Kyiv should prepare for less aid from the US.

Trump has previously pledged to end the Ukraine war quickly, but unlike US President Biden has not upheld Ukraine’s territorial integrity as a priority. It was Zelenskyy’s first meeting with Trump since the November 5 election. The pair did not make a joint statement.

On Monday, however, Zelenskyy said he would “soon” organise a meeting of what he considered an essential core of European countries as a coordination group for aid to Ukraine.

“Our approach to this group includes, at a minimum, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Poland. We also hope Denmark and other partners will join,” Zelenskyy said.

The absence of any reference to the US, whose incoming head of state he had just met, was pointed.

Against the threat of a decline in the US military presence in Europe, Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service reported there were talks among EU members to set up a 500bn-euro ($525bn) defence fund to finance Ukrainian defence and European military expansion for a decade. The European Commission floated the idea of a 100bn-euro ($105bn) defence bond early this year to no effect.

Ukraine’s diplomatic overtures for weaponry took place against a slow Russian advance on the ground in Ukraine’s east during the past week, and a Russian humiliation in Syria.

Russia made marginal gains south and east of Pokrovsk, a town it has been trying to capture since the summer. On Tuesday its troops advanced inside Kurakhove and seized the settlement’s grain elevator. Both towns are in the eastern region of Donetsk, and Russia has devoted enormous manpower to capturing them.

On the day of Russia’s advance inside Kurakhove, for example, Ukraine’s general staff reported 208 combat clashes across the front, 98 of them towards Pokrovsk and Kurakhove.

This ratio of attacks has reflected Russian priorities for weeks.

Konstantyn Mashovets, a Ukrainian war analyst, said Russia had devoted at least half the personnel of its central and eastern military districts to seizing the villages of Pokrovsk and Kurakhove, as well as two villages on the Donetsk-Zaporizhia border, Velika Novosilka and Vremivka.

Voloshyn, the spokesman for the Khortytsia group of forces defending the area, said Russia had assigned 70,000 soldiers to Pokrovsk and 35,000-36,000 to Kurakhove.

These lines of attack were mutually reinforcing, with pressure on Velika Novosilka and Vremivka designed to cut off lines of supply to Pokrovsk and Kurakhove, said Bogdan Petrenko, a spokesman for the 48th separate artillery brigade fighting in Vremivka.

The manpower Russia was expending on these four villages was reflected in heightened Russian losses.

There were about 3,000 Russian dead and wounded – almost a brigade’s worth – over two weeks in Pokrovsk alone, reported Serhiy Tsekhotsky, an officer of the 59th separate mechanized brigade fighting for the town.

Oleksandr Pavlyuk, commander of ground forces, estimated Russian casualties for the previous week across the front at 11,240 – a daily average of more than 1,600, tolls Al Jazeera was unable to independently verify.

Despite its enormous efforts in Ukraine, Russia’s standing on the world stage diminished last week, as it was forced to evacuate bases in Syria that had been used to prop up the government of Bashar al-Assad.

The opposition Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group took control of Aleppo on November 30 after a short fight, despite Russian air attacks against rebel command posts and troop concentrations.

By December 4, HTS had consolidated its control over the city sufficiently to begin marching on Hama, which fell the following day, followed by Homs on December 7. Damascus toppled on Sunday, December 8.

As opposition forces closed in, Russia withdrew.

Satellite images taken on December 9 showed that all Russian ships and submarines had left the port of Tartous.

“The Russians are also transferring the remnants of their weapons and military equipment from Syria by military aircraft from the Hmeimim airbase,” Ukraine’s military intelligence GUR said.

The leadership change in Syria has brought the end of Russia’s standing military presence in the Mediterranean for now.

The GUR said, “The likely loss of Russia’s military bases in Tartous and Hmeimim will finalise the Kremlin’s defeat in the Middle East.”