Ukraine has received its first delivery of National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems and Aspide air defense systems in its fight against Russian forces.
"We will continue to shoot down the enemy targets attacking us. Thank you to our partners: Norway, Spain and the US," Ukrainian Minister of Defense Oleksii Reznikov wrote on Twitter.
White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said last month the United States was accelerating the shipment of the sophisticated NASAMS to Ukraine after significant Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
The Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense research group, underscored the urgency to provide Ukraine with more Western equipment and ammunition against missile and drone attacks.
In a report, RUSI said, "The West must avoid complacency about the need to urgently bolster Ukrainian air-defense capacity. It is purely thanks to its failure to destroy Ukraine's mobile SAM [surface-to-air missile] systems that Russia remains unable to effectively employ the potentially heavy and efficient aerial firepower of its fixed-wing bomber and multi-role fighter fleets to bombard Ukrainian strategic targets and frontline positions from medium altitude, as it did in Syria."
Meanwhile, Britain's Defense Ministry said Monday that Russia's loss of experienced air crew members during the invasion of Ukraine is contributing to Moscow's "lack of air superiority" and has likely been exacerbated by poor training along with "heightened risks of conducting close air support in dense air defense zones."
Russia's air capacity "is unlikely to change in the next few months," the U.K. said in an update posted on Twitter. "Russia's aircraft losses likely significantly outstrip their capacity to manufacture new airframes. The time required for the training of competent pilots further reduces Russia's ability to regenerate combat air capability."
Also Monday, Russia's Defense Ministry took the unusual step of denying reports by Russian military bloggers that a naval infantry unit had lost hundreds of men in a fruitless offensive in eastern Ukraine, Reuters reported, citing reports by Russia's state-owned RIA news agency.
RIA said the ministry had rejected the bloggers' assertions that the 155th marine brigade of Russia's Pacific Fleet had suffered "high, pointless losses in people and equipment."
On the contrary, over 10 days, the unit had advanced 5 kilometers (over 3 miles) into Ukrainian defensive positions southwest of Donetsk, RIA quoted the ministry as saying.
The rare denial, according to Reuters, suggested the reports had touched a raw nerve as Russian forces are under heavy pressure in partly occupied regions of Ukraine that Moscow has proclaimed as its own territory — a land grab denounced as illegal by Kyiv, the West and most countries of the United Nations.
Meanwhile, power has been partially restored Monday in the occupied city of Kherson, but millions remain without power. Ukraine's national power company, Ukrenergo, continues rolling blackouts in Kyiv and six other regions as it repairs the country's energy grid.
In his nightly video address Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, "More than 4.5 million consumers are without electricity" and warned that Russia was preparing for more strikes on the country's energy infrastructure ahead of winter. Between 30% and 40% of Ukraine's energy infrastructure had been destroyed by Russian airstrikes last month, Zelenskyy and other officials said.
Invoking wartime laws Monday, Zelenskyy seized the assets of a top engine maker and four other strategic companies, placing them under the control of Ukraine's Defense Ministry to meet the country's urgent wartime needs.
"Such steps, which are necessary for our country in conditions of war, are carried out in accordance with current laws and will help meet the urgent needs of our defense sector," he wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
Ukraine accused Russia on Monday of looting empty homes in the southern city of Kherson and occupying them with troops in civilian clothes to prepare for street fighting in what both sides predict will be one of the war's most important battles, Reuters reported.
In recent days, Russia has ordered civilians out of Kherson in anticipation of a Ukrainian attempt to recapture the city, the only regional capital Moscow has seized since its February invasion.
Ukraine officials have described the evacuation of the area as a forced deportation, a war crime. Moscow says it is sending residents away for safety.
Kherson lies in the only pocket of Russian-held territory on the west bank of the Dnipro River, which bisects Ukraine. Recapturing it has been the focus of Ukraine's counteroffensive in the south, which has accelerated since the start of October.
New satellite images by Maxar, a U.S.-based space technology company, show that three mass burial sites near occupied Mariupol have "steadily" grown since spring, according to the BBC. There are roughly 1,500 new graves at one of them — Staryi Krym, northwest of Mariupol, where more than 4,600 graves have been dug since the beginning of Russia's invasion. It is, however, hard to know for sure how many bodies are buried at the site.
The other mass burial sites are Manhush and Vynohradne, located west and east, respectively, of Mariupol, a port city that endured Russia's monthslong siege.
The death toll caused by the siege remains unclear, as Mariupol, once home to nearly 500,000 people, sits in the occupied part of the Donetsk region.
Witnesses in Mariupol told the BBC they have seen Russian proxies clearing bodies from the rubble of destroyed buildings over recent months to bury them elsewhere.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
