Putin pledges ‘unlimited’ support to expanded Russian military

The Kremlin has pledged to expand and provide unlimited financial support to Russia’s military as it struggles in Ukraine, and warned that the visit by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to the United States would lead only to a further intensification of the war.

“We have no funding restrictions. The country and the government are providing everything that the army asks for – everything,” Russian president Vladimir Putin told senior defence officials in Moscow on Wednesday.

“I trust there will be an appropriate response and results will be achieved,” he said almost 10 months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour, which has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions and placed swathes of eastern and southeastern Ukraine under occupation.

“We will improve the armed forces and the entire military component of the state… We will address challenges around reinforcing our defence capabilities in general and … challenges that have emerged during the special military operation,” Mr Putin added, using the Kremlin’s term for the war.

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Mr Putin supported a proposal from defence minister Sergei Shoigu to increase the number of Russian combat personnel in the military to 1.5 million from the current 1.15 million. Mr Shoigu said the move was needed to counter growing threats from Nato states.

The Russian leader also insisted, however – in apparent reference to the damage done to Soviet finances by the cold war-era arms race – that “we will not repeat the mistakes of the past, when in the interests of increasing defence capacity … we destroyed our economy”.

Mr Putin met his defence chiefs as Mr Zelenskiy travelled to Washington for his first known journey outside Ukraine since Russia launched its all-out attack on February 24th.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said nothing positive would come from the trip: “The supply of weapons continues and the range of supplied weapons is growing. All this, of course, leads to an aggravation of the conflict. This does not bode well for Ukraine.”

Russia claimed sovereignty in September over four regions of Ukraine – having occupied Crimea in 2014 – but it has been driven back in Kharkiv and Kherson provinces in recent months and made little headway in the Donbas area, where on Tuesday Mr Zelenskiy visited troops in the frontline town of Bakhmut.

“We realise that, as of today, Russia has no capacity to defeat us in an open battle,” said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council.

“They are now driven into a dead-end. And a rat backed into a dead-end is the most dangerous. So we are actively preparing for the next one, two, three months, which could be decisive,” he told Voice of America, adding that the Kremlin would not back down because it has “put everything on the line”.

Rolling blackouts continued across Ukraine as engineers repaired damage from repeated Russian missile and drone strikes on the national grid, which rights groups Amnesty International called “a blatant violation of international humanitarian law [which is] endangering the lives of civilians with freezing temperatures setting in”.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, is expected to visit Moscow on Thursday to discuss the possible creation of a “security zone” around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, a complex of six-reactors in Russian-occupied territory that has suffered damage from shelling that Kyiv and Moscow blame on each other’s forces.