
December 19, 2013
Odd and cruel episodes from police blotters around the world...
Odd and cruel episodes from police blotters around the world...
Russia continues to shrink its ambitions in Donbas, as Ukraine doubles down on its strategy of guerilla attacks, interrupting supply and communication contacts and ultimately undermines the morale of the enemy.
Ukrainian soldiers sitting atop a tank in Donbas on May 22
For years to come, military experts will be studying how Ukraine managed to push back a far stronger enemy and grind Russia’s major offensive in the east of the country to a halt.
Some military strategists are already trying to find a term to sum up the Ukrainians’ success. Australian military expert and retired army major general Mick Ryan credited Kyiv's stunning showing to "the adoption of a simple military strategy: corrosion. The Ukrainian approach has embraced the corrosion of the Russian physical, moral, and intellectual capacity to fight and win in Ukraine.”
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
Sign up to our free daily newsletter.Ryan argues that while the Ukrainians have used the firepower they possess to halt the Russian advance, while aggressively targeting their enemy’s greatest shortcoming. “They have attacked the weakest physical support systems of an army in the field – communications networks, logistic supply routes, rear areas, artillery and senior commanders in their command posts,” Ryan wrote.
According to reports, Ukraine’s corrosion strategy has focused on a previously neglected area: guerrilla attacks in Russian-occupied cities. Last week, the Ukrainian army reported that it had killed multiple Russian officers in an attack in Melitopol. The following day, it reported another successful attack in the city, this time on a Russian armored train apparently transporting soldiers from Crimea to the front.
The situation is also escalating in occupied Kherson, which the Russians plan to annex by holding a rigged so-called “referendum.” The city is plastered with posters calling for Russian soldiers to leave or be killed.
One such poster shows a Ukrainian guerrilla fighter slitting the throat of a Russian soldier from behind. Above the image are the words “Get ready! We know all your patrol routes! Kherson is Ukraine!” The intention is clear: to make sure the Russian occupiers don’t feel safe anywhere and to further erode the already shaky morale among Russian troops.
Over the last few days, the situation at the front has not changed significantly. The Russians are concentrating their attacks on the Donbas region, but have only managed to take a few villages there, and it seems they have paid for the ground gained with heavy losses. The offensive on the Izium axis is still stalled, while around Kharkiv the Ukrainians have pushed the Russians back towards the Russian-Ukrainian border. Their artillery may soon be within range of the railway line between the Russian city of Belgorod and the occupied Ukrainian city of Kupiansk, an important supply line for the Russians.
For the last few days, the Ukrainian military in the south of the country has been reporting that the Russians are digging in and reinforcing their positions at certain points along the front. All of which suggests that they intend to halt their offensive there and focus instead on holding the territory they have already gained.
The current situation favors a stalemate in the short term.
At the same time, more and more heavy weaponry sent from Western countries is arriving at Ukrainian positions in the east of the country. According to the Pentagon, 79 of the 90 M777 howitzers sent from the US have now arrived at the front, and the Soviet-style Type T-72M1 and T-72M1R tanks sent from Poland have apparently also arrived, making the Ukrainians more evenly matched with the Russians in terms of artillery.
“The current situation favors a stalemate in the short term and is increasingly favoring Ukraine in the medium to long term,” according to Polish military analyst Konrad Muzyka from Rochan Consulting. “The influx of Western weapons and Ukrainian personnel will allow Kyiv to start pushing Russian forces back across a much wider stretch of the front.”
Many military experts believe that, with the number of troops it currently has available, Russia will not be able to turn the tide in Ukraine. That is why Moscow has begun a secret mobilization effort, as reported by the BBC and other media outlets over the last few days.
It seems that reservists have been summoned to recruitment offices, where officials are trying to convince them to sign short-term contracts to fight in Ukraine. At least ten such offices have been attacked in the last few days, some with petrol bombs – possibly the work of Russian saboteurs who fear they may be conscripted.
Ukrainian soldiers resting at a checkpoint on the outskirt of the separatist region of Donetsk.
The Kremlin’s decision to reportedly suspend many military leaders has caused even greater uncertainty among troops. According to the British Ministry of Defence, Lieutenant General Serhiy Kisel, commander of the elite 1st Guards Tank Army, has been suspended for his failure to capture Kharkiv. Vice Admiral Igor Osipov, commander of the Black Sea Fleet, has reportedly also been fired because of the sinking of the flagship Moskva.
The British believe the blame culture within the Russian military and ministries means that high-up Russian military leaders spend more time covering their own backs than concentrating on the war itself.
“This will likely place more strain on Russia’s centralized model of command and control, as officers increasingly seek to defer key decisions to their superiors,” according to the British. And that will make it even harder for Russia to gain back the upper hand in this war.
Russia continues to shrink its ambitions in Donbas, as Ukraine doubles down on its strategy of guerilla attacks, interrupting supply and communication contacts and ultimately undermines the morale of the enemy.
Russian troops are attempting to encircle Severodonetsk, the last key city remaining under Ukrainian control in the Luhansk region, as Vladimir Putin looks to claim victory in a war that is not going Moscow's way. But will the toll be for civilians?
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.