Honourable Russian Intentions in Ukraine

 "Some 90 percent of buildings are damaged [in Sievierodonetsk, the largest city still under kraine control. More than two-thirds of the city's housing stock has been completely destroyed. There is no telecommunication. There is constant shelling."

"Capturing Sievierodonetsk is a fundamental task for the occupiers ... We do all we can to hold this advance."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Thousands of civilians remain in the city of Sievierodonetsk as Russia closes in on one of the major cities in Donbas

 

Critical infrastructure in Sievierodonetsk, in the eastern region of Luhansk has been destroyed by Russian shelling. The absurd part of the situation is that it's Russia's goal to take command of the city. A city the Russian military had destroyed. Just as it has destroyed all towns, villages and cities that it has been their intention to control. Russia, in its conflict with Ukraine, has in effect destroyed its own economy in the process. It has certainly destroyed its standing as a respected, moral nation. Most international communities view Russia, Moscow, the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin with dismay-tinged disgust.

Moscow's territorial ambitions aligned with its president's illogical claims of a Jewish-governed Ukraine representing a fascist enclave with neo-Nazis operating its society and politics and a military steeped in pride for its fascist loyalties have fallen flat in the eyes and ears of a world gaping with horror at what an unrestrained military attack on a European nation is capable of in its destruction capacity with modern weapons of war needlessly making a charnel house of Russia's neighbour.

 

Lithuanians by the hundreds have raised from civilian donations $5.4 million to fund a ByraktarTB2 military drone. "This is the first case in history when ordinary people raise money to buy something like a Bayraktar. It is unprecedented", said Beshta Petro, Ukraine's ambassador to Lithuania. As for the invading Russian troops; in attempting to restore the Mariupol water system now that they have gained control of the port city, a system they had themselves destroyed while it remained in Ukraine's defence, many interred bodies have washed out of the ground, 

 

Russian soldiers hauled these corpses of dead Ukrainian civilians to a supermarket and left the decomposing bodies of civilians on the floor. "The Russians are bringing the bodies of the dead here [in the supermarket], bodies which were washed out of graves and partially exhumed in an attempt to restore water supply. They are just dumping them like garbage", said Petro Andryushehenko, Mariupol's Ukrainian mayor's adviser.

"Yes, people are being killed. But the operation is taking so much time primarily because Russian soldiers taking part are under strict orders categorically to avoid attacks and strikes on civilian infrastructure", explained Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.

"The liberation of the Doentsk and Luhansk regions, recognized by the Russian Federation as independent states, is an unconditional priority."

"I do not believe that they [Donbas residents] will be happy to return to the authority of a neo-Nazi regime that has proven it is Russophobic in essence."

"These people must decide for themselves."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov

Leaving the Ukrainian government to plead with Western powers which have been unstinting in their moral support and the initially-reluctant supply of military weapons leading to greater measures to send more sophisticated, long-range and more powerful weapons to aid a country whose plight will not move them to directly intervene for fear of sparking a larger conflict. The battle for Sievierodonetsk on the eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donets River has allowed creeping gains for Russia with its superior firepower.

Earlier phases of the war saw Russian forces  spread more widely and thinly when towns and cities were bludgeoned with artillery and airstrikes destroying civilian areas and civic infrastructure, a reality that Moscow steadfastly denies as they pass a wink from one to another of their generals who have themselves become victims of a Ukrainian military response that speaks of a refusal to surrender to Moscow's ambitions.