Ukraine updates: Zelenskyy to attend Ramstein meeting

The UK will provide Ukraine with 650 lightweight multi-role missiles to help Kyiv protect itself against Russian drones and bombing, the British government said on Friday.

The missiles to be sent are worth £162 million (roughly $213.13 million; €192 million) and have a range of 6 kilometers (3.73 miles). They can be fired from a variety of platforms on land, sea and air.

The first batch is due to arrive by the end of the year, the Defense Ministry said.

The missiles package is expected to be formally announced by British Defense Secretary John Healey during a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, an ad hoc coalition of some 50 nations, in Germany on Friday. 

"This new commitment will give an important boost to Ukraine's air defenses," Healey said in a statement.

A meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group is scheduled to take place on Friday at the United States' Ramstein Air Base in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. 

Defense ministers and senior military officials will meet from 9:30 a.m. local time (0730 GMT) at the invitation of US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will attend, according to media reports. A government spokesman in Berlin said Zelenskyy would also have a one-on-one meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Frankfurt in the afternoon.

At the Ramstein meeting, which will also be attended by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, Zelenskyy is expected to personally ask the allies for more weapons to counter Russia. The focus would be on long-range missiles and increased air defenses. 

London has already announced that the UK will send 650 new special missile systems to Ukraine to strengthen its air defenses.

The US unveiled charges against five members of Russia's military intelligence agency on Thursday.

The US Justice Department accused five officers of the Russian agency, known as the GRU, of engaging in "destructive" computer attacks on civilian computer systems in Ukraine and around the world.

The five officers, along with a civilian who was already under indictment for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, allegedly "engaged in a conspiracy to hack into, exfiltrate data from, leak information obtained from and destroy computer systems associated with the Ukrainian government in advance of the Russian invasion of Ukraine," the Justice Department said in a statement.

Ukrainian government systems and data were targeted, as well as countries that supported Ukraine, including the US and 25 other NATO countries, the Justice Department said.

The US is offering a reward of up to $10 million (€9 million) for information about the defendants.

Ukraine's incursion into Russia's southern Kursk region is working and there have been no Russian advances in a key sector of the eastern front for six days, Ukrainian top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said in an interview broadcast by CNN on Thursday.

"Over the last six days, the enemy hasn't advanced a single meter in the Pokrovsk direction. In other words, our strategy is working," he said.

The Kursk incursion, he said, had "significantly improved the morale of not only the military but the entire Ukrainian population."

Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his nightly video address, said Ukrainian troops were holding their positions in Kursk "and with each day of the operation we are proving to the world that Russia can lose this war."

dh/sms (AP, AFP, dpa, Reuters)