AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has announced more U.S. aid for Ukraine days after a pair of Russian airstrikes killed at least 51 people in central Ukraine in one of the deadliest attacks since Russia launched its invasion in 2022. Austin spoke at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany earlier today.

DEFENSE SECRETARY LLOYD AUSTIN: And, friends, this is a critical moment. Time is of the essence, especially with winter on its way. And we must all step up our support, and quickly. So I’m pleased to say that President Biden will announce today an additional $250 million security assistance package for Ukraine. It will surge more capabilities to meet Ukraine’s evolving requirements. And we will deliver them at the speed of war.

AMY GOODMAN: While in Germany, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who called on Western nations to send more arms to Ukraine.

PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY: At the same time as our advance in the Kursk region, the Russian army continues its offensive in Ukraine. The most capable units of the Russian army are involved in expanding the zone of occupation of our territory in the Donetsk region. This is a clear choice by Moscow. Putin wants more Ukraine to occupy than he wants security for Russia. He doesn’t care about Russian land and people. He just wants to grab as much of our land and as many of our cities as possible.

AMY GOODMAN: Zelensky’s comments come as Ukraine continues its incursion into eastern Russia.

We now go to the capital of Ukraine, to Kyiv, where we’re joined by Arwa Damon. She’s a former senior international correspondent at CNN, but she’s now the founder of the humanitarian group INARA. She recently returned from Gaza, which we will talk about, as well.

But given that you’re in Ukraine’s capital right now and you were just in Kharkiv, where on Sunday at least 47 people were injured when a Russian missile strike on a shopping mall and sports center took place, seven children wounded, that attack occurring just, what, two days after another Russian strike on Kharkiv, Arwa Damon, if you can talk about the humanitarian situation in Ukraine right now in the places that you have visited?

ARWA DAMON: Well, I actually went to the location of those strikes that happened in Kharkiv at the sports center. And, you know, people are obviously very shaken up, because they have not really experienced this level of intensity of bombing in quite some time now. And what it did was force us and a number of other organizations to cancel some of the activities that we had planned. There’s obviously great wariness in terms of bringing groups of people, groups of children together, given that Russia does tend to have a propensity to go after schools, hospitals and other civilian targets.

I met with a number of children that INARA does work with through our local partner in underground, makeshift shelters. And I remember speaking to a little girl whose father was killed very early on in this war. And her grandmother was telling us about how, still to date — and it’s been, you know, well over two years now — whenever she goes to her father’s grave, she just throws herself on top of it and sobs and sobs and has to be dragged away. And when you speak to those who are trying to help children in the mental health space, they talk about how this trauma is becoming deeply ingrained within the psyche, especially the psyche of the youngest. And it’s becoming very difficult to try to actually build these programs that are needed to begin to help children to try to move forward and address their trauma, because, obviously, especially as we have been seeing, you know, with these more recent strikes, the triggers are constantly still there.

People are in a better position and situation than they were in when I was last in Ukraine just over a year ago, but there are still some basic things that are needed, whether it’s school supplies or different activities for children to be able to occupy themselves. It’s also vastly different depending on which part of Ukraine that you’re in. Kharkiv, for example, is accessible. The areas that are closer to the frontlines obviously have much more significant and much more dire needs, ranging from — you know, everything from hygiene products to food.

AMY GOODMAN: Arwa, I want to go to a short video you filmed when you were in Kharkiv.

ARWA DAMON: All of the schools have basically turned their basements into makeshift shelters.

SOPHIA: Sophia.

ARWA DAMON: Aw. Hi, Sophia. How old are you?

SOPHIA: [translated] Seven.

ARWA DAMON: Her father was killed in the war.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’ve been working with a local NGO in Kharkiv to deal with the psychosocial effects on children of this ongoing war. Can you talk more about that?

ARWA DAMON: Yeah, so, a lot of the activities — and remember, these are children that have mostly been displaced. Kharkiv’s demographic has shifted drastically. Many of these sort of original inhabitants of the city have left, and it has become something of an internally displaced hub. There are hundreds of thousands of people from different parts of the country closer to the frontlines that actually evacuated themselves to Kharkiv. Some of them have managed to find accommodation. Others are living in these dormitories because Kharkiv used to be a university city.

What we try to do is everything from sort of group activities to art therapy, sports therapy, as well as one-on-one sessions when children are identified as needing that. But there is obviously a huge amount of need and very few resources that are available at this stage. The need by far eclipses what any organization is able to do on its own, although there are quite a few individual efforts that are happening. Of course, the great concern is that if these traumas within children are not addressed early on, they can then calcify, so to speak.

And then you also have the trauma that parents are going through, especially mothers, because a lot of these families that we work with are right now single mother households. Fathers are either on the frontline or they’ve stayed back, you know, even in occupied territories, to sort of keep control and keep an eye on their homes. And so, women, these mothers, are really struggling a lot emotionally at being separated from their husbands, but also at having to somehow find work and then somehow fill the role of both mother and father for their children.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the situation — you are in the capital Kyiv right now. You have the government resigning as part of President Zelensky’s biggest shakeup of the administration. Among the resignations tendered are the Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, weapons chief Oleksandr Kamyshin. What this means, and the request for more weapons now, that we just covered, with Lloyd Austin saying there will be more weapons, and U.S. weapons, the permission Zelensky continues to seek to be able to use them to attack Russia in Russia?

ARWA DAMON: You know, I was actually talking to a number of people down in Kharkiv about America’s support, the West’s support for Ukraine. And the sense down there at least, and not just among people there, but others that I’ve been speaking to, as well, is that the U.S. is giving Ukraine enough so that it doesn’t lose, but not enough so that it can actually make significant and needed gains. And there’s a big level of frustration when it comes to this particular aspect.

When it comes to, you know, the government, there are, of course, frustrations with the way things are run. There are concerns about corruption existing within the government. There is a sense that maybe some sort of a shakeup does need to take place.

But what it boils down to is people here are exhausted. This has been going on for well over two years right now, and they really want to begin to be able to see a way out. Those who are fighting on the frontlines are exhausted. You hear a lot of people speaking about how many of these soldiers have limbs that have been amputated, how many of them are not sufficiently trained and then they’re being deployed out to the frontlines, because, obviously, you know, Ukraine is drafting its male population into its fighting force.

And so, there’s a lot of different dynamics that are happening at the same time, but there’s also a sense that this is stagnating to a certain degree, which is why so many people want to see the U.S. actually, as they’ll call it, properly support Ukraine so that Ukraine can start making gains instead of simply holding on to the status quo.

AMY GOODMAN: And then there are others who are talking about, “Why isn’t a ceasefire being negotiated?” Which actually brings me to the second part of where you just were, which was in Gaza. I’m wondering, as you tell Ukrainians about where you just were, what is their response to what’s happening in Palestine?

ARWA DAMON: It is a conversation that I did have. And actually, I was messaging with a friend of mine in Gaza, telling him, you know, “Yes, I’ve just arrived to Ukraine.” And he said, you know, “Please, please pass on my regards to the children, and I hope people there are doing better.” And I was passing this on to a number of Ukrainians that I was meeting with in Kharkiv, and they were expressing their deep empathy for what Gaza was going through. One woman who I was talking to said, you know, “We see what’s happening there, and we realize that, as horrible as what’s happening to us is, in a weird, bizarre, twisted kind of way, when we compare our situation to Gaza, we realize that we’re lucky.”

And I was passing that on again to my same Gazan friend, and he drew reassurance from that. He said that, you know, knowing that people on the outside empathize with what they were going through made them feel as if they were a bit less alone, because, as he put it, and as anyone who’s been through a war will put it, you don’t really understand what war is, what it means, what it does to your psyche, what it does to you physically, what it does to everything you know and you love and you live for, until you’ve actually lived through it yourself.