A War of Propaganda and War Crimes

"Militarily, the city and its bridges serve as a Russian toehold on the southwest bank of the Dnieper River, which cuts Ukraine in two. Russian control of Kherson allows the Kremlin to continue to use the city as a base to try to capture the neighboring ports of Odesa and Mykolaiv, thereby crippling Ukraine’s export-based economy. Conversely, liberating Kherson is probably a prerequisite for Ukraine to recapture several other cities."

"U.S. and European weapons have already helped bring a halt to Russia’s slow advance in the east and created the potential for Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive. If that aid can be sustained — and undeniably, there are challenges and costs involved — it will make Russia’s invasion less and less sustainable. That’s ultimately what will gravely weaken the Kremlin’s illegal occupation of Ukrainian cities and its impetus to take what it wants through force, something that’s a threat not only to Ukraine but also to the U.S. and its allies."

Sébastien Roblin, military writer, Think: Opinion, Analysis, Essays

A Ukrainian soldier patrols along an undisclosed frontline position in Mykolaiv Oblast, Ukraine, on Aug. 23.  Alex Chan / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP

 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has invited Russian soldiers to abandon their ill-fated mission that the Kremlin dispatched them to fulfill in invading and occupying Ukraine and slowly destroying towns and villages, emptying cities, flattening neighbouhoodrs and civil infrastructure, shelling schools and hospitals indiscriminately and generally indulging in massive human rights abuses, in their commission of war crimes. "If they want to survive, it is time for Russian soldiers to flee. Go home."

 

It has long been known that Ukrainian forces have been massing in the Donbas for an eventual planned offensive with the determination to retrieve from Moscow's clutches vast tracts of Ukraine's territory in the east that belongs to sovereign Ukraine and which Russia now claims as its own. This war began in 2014 when the Kremlin surreptitiously committed to supporting, training and arming ethnic Russian Ukrainian terrorists who succeeded in capturing with the help of the Russian military, most of Donetsk and Luhansk, declaring them to be autonomous republics.

 

To cap off their adventure in international criminality Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula, establishing its deep-water port on the Black Sea for its fleet. Both Lohansk and Donetsk have been declared by Vladimir Putin as Russian territories. But not if the government and people of Ukraine have anything to say about it and they have quite a lot invested in its history, geography, heritage and culture, not to speak of national pride.

 

Increased supplies of Western military aid has little by little allowed the Ukraine military to advance its restoration agenda, of shoving back on the Russian military. The cost to both sides in terms of lives lost; military for Russia in the tens of thousands, and both military and civilian in Ukraine's case, in equally large total numbers, remains substantial and tragic. But loss of human life, and wholesale destruction of a nation's infrastructure rings no soothing sounds of compassion from the Kremlin.

 

Moscow's propaganda machine has been churning out lies at an incredible rate and nothing, absolutely nothing that issues from Russian official sources can be trusted. Ironically, Russian media speaks with utter contempt of Ukraine's propaganda machine. In league with their president who claims Ukraine's neo-Nazi character is a potential security risk to Russia's tolerant and patient government, a threat that must be expunged and Ukraine freed from the shackles of fascism.

 

Spurring pacifist Russia to invade and to destroy its neighbour with absolute abandonment of humanity. Ukraine has now announced the start of its long-hinted-at counteroffensive meant to restore its territorial integrity from rapacious Russian intentions. For its part, Moscow has already dismissed talk of a Ukraine offensive, speaking of it as an ill-designed strategy that has already cost Ukraine dearly in lost troop lives. 

 

Russian shelling continues to target port cities such as Mykolaiv, even as the Kremlin solemnly claims time and again that the Russian military never targets non-military sites. Russian occupation in the south and east of Ukraine continues in artillery bombardments and airstrikes with swaths of Ukrainian territory near the Black Sea coast including the city of Kherson which were captured by Russia early in its invasion. Ukraine's southern command spokeswoman points out its troops began offensive actions n the south, in the Kherson region, north of Russian-annexed Crimea.

 

Ukrainian soldiers prepare artillery at the southern front line near Kherson last month  Getty Images

For its part, the Ukrainian strategy of making use of sophisticated Western-supplied weapons, hitting Russian ammunition depots and wreaking havoc with supply lines, have had their effect in demoralizing Russian troops. Ukraine struck over ten sites in the past week alone that had "unquestionably weakened the enemy". Statements that the Russia-appointed governors in the occupied territory dismiss as "Ukrainian propaganda".

Moscow claims that Ukrainian troops' attempts at an offensive in southern Mykolaiv and Kherson regions had ended with the area sustaining significant casualties: "Enemy's offensive attempt failed miserably", reported the RIA news agency quoting a local Russia-appointed official reporting the evacuation of people from Nova Kahokva in the east of Kherson following over ten missile strikes by Ukrainian forces. 

Mykolaiv is a shipbuilding centre and port on the Southern Bug river off the Black Sea and has suffered heavy Russian bombardment during the course of the war, yet still remains in Ukrainian hands. The Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in south Ukraine is anticipating a mission from the International Atomic Energy Agency to investigate the plant's vulnerability and condition resulting from nearby shelling in the facility's vicinity. 

The mission is to assess physical damage, evaluate working conditions and check safety and security systems, and "perform urgent safeguards activities", referencing tracking nuclear material. The Kremlin refuses to vacate the nuclear site even as the United Nations, United States and Ukraine call for withdrawal of military equipment and personnel from the complex, to completely remove the possibility that it will become a target in this war of attrition.