Russia's 'Special Military Operation'

"I attended the funerals of young men the age of my sons. I've met women who saw their husbands summarily executed by Russian troops. I met people missing limbs, or handicapped from war wounds, often in the prime of life."

"Not yet a year into this war and the casualties, military and civilians, Ukrainians and Russians are already over 200,000. To what end?"

"The Russian invasion of Ukraine, this great madness, has laid bare the weaknesses of a corrupt and ill-equipped army that struggles to hold territory but can still inflict death on a nightmarish scale."

"The easy victory Vladimir Putin thought was his in a week, has turned into a bloody quagmire."

Paule Robitaille, Quebec journalist journeying through the former Soviet Union

 

"They just throw in bodies [as new Russian conscripts at the front line] until something collapses." 

"Their equipment is crap, their weapons are crap, but these human waves are killing us."

Dan Bilak, foreign volunteer, Ukrainian territorial defence

"What we're doing today including with our special operation, is an attempt to stop this war and protect our people who live on these territories."

Russian President Vladimir Putin

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This is the explanation Mr. Putin gave in 2014 when he annexed the Crimean Peninsula and armed ethnic Russian Ukrainian rebels living in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region. This is what conquest of foreign regions is all about; claiming another nation's geography as one's own by sending in colonies of ethnics to give weight to the conquering state's power and entitlements. During the Soviet era of occupation of its satellite neighbours, ethnic Russians moved to the new territory as settlers consolidating Russian primacy.

Russians living in the 'near abroad' are used by the Kremlin in its stealth movements and threats of reoccupation, of restoring the territories controlled by the USSR. And Mr. Putin's explanation of Russia's obligation to uphold the right of ethnic Russians in protection of their language, their customs, their history and their political aims that coordinate with Moscow's gives the entitlement of forceful entry and violent conflict. As happened in Georgia, and then Ukraine's Luhansk and Donetsk provinces in the Donbas.

Russia, portraying Ukraine as the aggressor, and itself as the liberator. The approach that fascism rules supreme in Ukraine and it is Russia's mission to save Ukraine from itself. Ukrainians have not, by and large, honoured that scenario. The 'liberating' Russian military has flaunted all modern and universally accepted protocols of warfare focusing on sparing civilian populations direct conflict, left to the battlefield of opposing armies. 

 

The wholesale destruction of the Ukraine power grid in an effort to bring the country to its knees, the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, hospitals, schools, markets, apartment blocks, belies Moscow's protests at charges of war crimes. Mass graves, bodies lying in the street, direct witness accounts of human rights violations committed by Russian troops before withdrawing under Ukrainian counterattacks are more than ample evidence of the war crimes committed by Russia

With the help of the Wagner Group mercenaries, of Ramzan Kadyrov's Chechen military threat, the militias of the ethnic Russian separatist militias and others the Ukrainian counteroffensive has had its struggle cut out, but has acquitted itself admirably in retaining captured towns and villages and pushing Russian forces back to the front lines. An estimated 500 military deaths daily in heated combat appears not to have persuaded the Kremlin to pull back and pull out of its ill-designed 'special military operation'. 

The Ukrainian resistance, the level of determination and courage demonstrated by a military whose members only in the last several years were exposed to modern military strategies by NATO-member training sessions and supplied, hesitantly at first, then with growing impetus in larger, more effective military resources to counteract the Russian advance, surprised the world at large and gave heart to the Baltic nations who know that should Ukraine fall, they will be next; Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova among others.

 

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"[Ukraine is anxious for supporting nations to send Leopard 2 tanks and to] immediately, officially request the German government to allow delivery of these tanks to Ukraine". 

"This is the move that will make the whole situation crystal clear and we will see where it takes Germany. This is something that needs to be done right away and everything will become obvious."  

"[I am] confident [Germany would supply the tanks eventually]: We already received British Challenger. They said it would be impossible... Every time in the end we obtained the desired result. We will have it this time as well."

Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba