KYIV (Reuters) -- Air raid sirens wailed across Ukraine on Tuesday for the first time this week, as the United States and NATO allies unveiled new pledges of money and equipment to help restore power and heat knocked out by Moscow’s missile and drone strikes.
Ukrainians fled the streets for bomb shelters, although there were no immediate reports of major attacks away from the front. The all-clear was later sounded in the capital Kyiv, but officials said the threat had not necessarily lifted.
Foreign ministers from the NATO alliance were starting a two-day meeting in Bucharest, looking for ways both to keep millions of Ukrainian civilians safe and warm, and to sustain Kyiv’s military through the coming winter campaign.
“NATO will continue to stand for Ukraine as long as it takes. We will not back down,” alliance General-Secretary Jens Stoltenberg said in a speech in Bucharest.
He told reporters Russian President Vladimir Putin was “trying to use winter as a weapon of war” as Moscow’s forces lose on the battlefield, and that Western allies would step in to help.
U.S. and European officials, briefing ahead of the meeting on condition of anonymity, described packages of aid including cash, electricity transmission equipment and more weapons to fight off drones and replenish diminished ammunition stores.
“It is going to be a terrible winter for Ukraine, so we are working to strengthen our support for it to be resilient,” a senior European diplomat said.
Russia has been carrying out huge attacks on Ukraine’s electricity transmission and heating infrastructure roughly weekly since October, in what Kyiv and its allies say is a deliberate campaign to harm civilians, a war crime.
Moscow says hurting civilians is not its aim but that their suffering will end only if Kyiv accepts its demands, which it did not spell out. Although Kyiv says it shoots down most of the incoming missiles, the damage has been accumulating and the impact growing more severe with each strike.
The worst attack so far was last Wednesday, leaving millions of Ukrainians in cold and darkness. President Volodymyr Zelensky told Ukrainians at the start of this week to expect another soon that would be at least as damaging.
There are no political talks to end the war. Moscow has annexed Ukrainian territory which it says it will never relinquish; Ukraine says it will fight until it recovers all occupied land.