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Germany faced continued pressure Saturday after a key meeting of Western allies did not come up with a deal to supply Ukraine with the battle tanks that Kyiv says are a crucial part of its bid to take on entrenched Russian forces. Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania issued a joint appeal, urging Berlin to provide tanks “now,” adding: “Germany as the leading European power has special responsibility in this regard.”
Germany has been unwilling to supply its Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, or authorize other nations that use the German-made vehicles to transfer them. It has linked its position on the Leopards to U.S. reluctance to transfer its own M1 Abrams tanks, which Pentagon officials have said are not the best fit for Ukraine in terms of operability and the time they would take to arrive.
In his evening address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky named and memorialized the 14 killed in a helicopter crash on Wednesday, including Ukrainian Interior Minister Denis Monastyrsky. Zelensky called Monastyrsky a “professional, genuine person, exactly what the Minister of Internal Affairs should be.” At least one child was also killed when the government helicopter crashed near a kindergarten.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects around the globe.
Western Ukraine, distant from the front lines, feels the burdens of war: LVIV, Ukraine — When Alina Pidchenko, her husband, Serhii, and their three children moved to western Ukraine nine months ago, they believed they would be safe from the war.
But last Saturday, David L. Stern reports, the family once felt the effects of the conflict in the single room they share on the edge of Lviv: Russian missile strikes hit an electrical substation and a power plant, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without electricity or heating.
On Jan. 14, dozens of Russian missiles rained down across Ukraine, including in the west, where strikes severely damaged an electrical substation and a power plant in the Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, plunging hundreds of thousands of people, including the Pidchenko family, into cold and darkness. The power and heating went out for five hours, Alina said, and then again overnight as they slept.
No corner of Ukraine is untouched by the war — not even in the far west, a mostly agricultural region, dotted with farming villages and split down the middle by the Carpathian Mountains, which was long viewed as a place of refuge.