BRUSSELS: NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday that the alliance had no intention to send forces into Ukraine after Russia invaded its pro-Western neighbour.
“We don’t have NATO troops in Ukraine, and we don’t have any plans to send NATO troops into Ukraine,” Stoltenberg told a media conference after an emergency meeting of the alliance’s ambassadors.
The alliance would take new deterrence and defence steps after Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, Stoltenberg said. The plan would include putting over 100 warplanes on high alert and further increase the presence of troops on the alliance’s eastern flank.
NATO will hold a video summit on Friday to discuss the Russian operation, Stoltenberg said. “Russia is using force to try to rewrite history, and deny Ukraine its free and independent path.”
More than 40 Ukrainian soldiers and around 10 civilians have died in the first hours of Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, an aide to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters.
“I know that more than 40 have been killed and several dozen wounded. I am aware of nearly 10 civilian losses,” presidential administration aide Oleksiy Arestovych told reporters. Eighteen people have died in an air strike on a military base near Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odessa.
Ukraine’s military command has said government forces killed “around 50 Russian occupiers” while repulsing an attack on a town on the frontline with Moscow-backed rebels.
“Shchastya is under control. 50 Russian occupiers were killed. Another Russian plane was destroyed in the Kramatorsk district. This is the sixth,” the armed forces general staff said on Twitter.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has severed Kiev’s diplomatic relations with Moscow. It marked the first rupture in ties since Russia and Ukraine became independent countries after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
Later, Zelenskyy compared Russia’s invasion of his country to military campaigns carried out by Nazi Germany during World War II. “Russia has attacked Ukraine in a cowardly and suicidal way, like Nazi Germany did during World War II,” he said in an online briefing, during which he called on Ukrainians to “go out” and “protest against this war”.
