DAVOS, Switzerland – Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Jan 17 said his country’s priority for 2024 is to gain control over its skies as Russia’s full-scale assault enters its third year.

His comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos came just hours after Russian drone and missile attacks overnight wounded at least 20 people across Ukraine and shelling killed two civilians.

The barrage left massive craters in the southern city of Odesa, where AFP journalists saw residential buildings charred in the wake of the assault.

Rescue workers hauled out vulnerable residents on stretchers from housing blocks that had had their windows blown out in the Black Sea city, footage from emergency services showed.

“In 2024, of course the priority is to throw Russia from the skies,” Mr Kuleba said, in an address to the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Because the one who controls the skies will define when and how the war will end,” he added.

Kyiv has long pressured the West to deliver advanced fighter jets to support its troops entrenched in the south and east of the country.

Responding to those calls, President Emmanuel Macron announced this week that France would deliver a new batch of around 40 Scalp long-range cruise missiles, as well as hundreds of bombs, as Kyiv fights the Russian invasion.

But even that pledge is limited compared with the range of munitions that Russian forces have recently been raining down across Ukraine.

Beating Russia ‘takes time’

Officials in Kyiv have seen a steep rise in civilian casualties since December, as Moscow intensifies air attacks, reversing a downward trend seen earlier in 2023, the United Nations has warned.

On Jan 17, officials in the southern region of Kherson said one person had been killed and another injured by Russian shelling.

And in the north-eastern Kharkiv region, Governor Oleg Synegubov said a woman was killed in Russian shelling on a village near the border.

A boy, aged 10, had to have a limb amputated, and a 14-year-old girl received shrapnel wounds in the attack, he added.

Kyiv also said it destroyed all but one of 20 Iranian-designed drones Russia launched at southern Ukraine in an attempted overnight attack.

Mr Kuleba called for patience among Ukraine’s key Western backers after the long-awaited counter-offensive in 2023 failed to punch through Russian positions.

“We are fighting a powerful enemy, a very big enemy that doesn’t sleep,” he said. “It takes time.

“We defeated them on the land in 2022. We defeated them in the sea in 2023, and we are completely focused on defeating them in the air in 2024,” he told a discussion panel at the forum in Switzerland.

‘Difficult’ moment on Russian border

His comments echo remarks by President Volodymyr Zelensky, who on Jan 16 said that Ukraine “must gain air superiority” to enable “progress on the ground”.

Various Nato countries are currently training Ukrainian pilots on American-made F-16 fighter jets.

Denmark said earlier in January it would transfer 19 F-16s in the second quarter of 2024.

Washington had previously resisted allowing the jet transfers for fear of being deemed by Moscow a direct belligerent in the Ukraine war.

Russia, meanwhile, on Jan 17 announced that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would travel to New York next week for a meeting of the United Nations’ Security Council on the Middle East.

Russia has also been weathering increased numbers of Ukrainian strikes, particularly in border regions where officials and residents are bolstering defences.

“The situation is, of course, difficult at the moment,” a member of a volunteer defence group, Mr Oleg Gerasimov, told AFP, in the border city of Belgorod.

“But we are hoping, believing, that the threat to our city and the whole country will end in the very near future,” he said.

Late in 2023, more than two dozen people were killed in a series of strikes on the city – the deadliest attack on Russian soil so far. AFP