The United States is ready to provide an additional $500 million in direct budget support to the Ukrainian government, U.S. President Joe Biden said during a telephone conversation with Ukrainian head of state Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday.
This was published in a statement by the White House, Ukrainian news portal Yevropeysk Pravda reports. Zelensky wrote on Twitter that he had talked to Biden for nearly an hour and talked about specific defense support, a strengthened sanctions package, and macro-financial and humanitarian assistance.
As Remix News reported earlier, on March 15, the U.S. announced it will provide a “historic” $13.6 billion in funding to Ukraine.
In addition, Zelensky briefed Biden on the status of Ukraine’s negotiations with Russia and the current battlefield situation.
Meanwhile, Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Ukraine, where he also went to the nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine on Wednesday.
In a briefing by video conference, he expressed hope that aid shipments would be sent to Ukraine within days and did not rule out the possibility that the agency could also send inspectors and technical experts to Ukraine.
Alexander Makrusin, the mayor of the town of Irpiny near Kyiv, who was taken back by Ukrainian forces two days ago, said in a news conference on Wednesday that some 300 civilians and 50 members of the Ukrainian armed forces were killed in the settlement. He added that they do not know the exact numbers of the victims because when fierce fighting broke out in the city, people buried the dead in gardens and parks. He also claimed that Russian tanks invading the city were rolling through corpses lying in the streets.
