Imperial Warmonger

"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

 

"[The only way to stop] this Russian aggression [is with] adequate weapons. The terrorist state will not understand anything else."

"Today, thanks to the air defense systems provided to Ukraine and the professionalism of our warriors, we managed to shoot down most of the Russian missiles and Shaheds,.".

"Unfortunately, it is difficult to provide 100% protection with air defense alone. Especially when terrorists use ballistic missiles."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

"I'm left without anything. Not a single room is left intact, everything got hit."

"At first, I heard a roar. And then there was an extremely loud strike that made me jump up. I was in the bedroom."

"I was saved by the fact that the bedroom is to the other side of the house."

Halyna Panosyan, 67,Hlevakha near Kyiv 

People check a destroyed house after a Russian rocket attack in Hlevakha, Kyiv region, Ukraine, Jan. 26, 2023.

 

“I think that this latest development in terms of armed supply is just an evolution of the situation and of the way Russia started moving the war into a different stage."

“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin has moved from a concept of [a] special [military] operation to a concept now of a war against NATO and the West."

European External Action Service Secretary-General Stefano Sannino

 

Ukrainian policemen stand in front of a damaged residential building after a Russian shelling in Kherson, southern Ukraine, on 29 January 2023. Photograph: Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images

 

Russia, in a fury over the newly announced release of Germany's Leopard tanks to the Ukrainian military in anticipation of a spring advance planned by the Kremlin, lost no time in venting its ire by targeting civilian infrastructure and energy grids all over Ukraine, well beyond the front lines. The hard-won Western pledges of dozens of battlefield tanks in an effort to repel the Russian invasion led Moscow to implode with fury.

This response was hardly a new and different one totally unexpected, since Moscow regularly responded to any battlefield successes realized by Ukrainian counteroffensive forces with massed air strikes leaving millions without light, heat or water. Some 15 of the total of 24 drones Russia sent over Ukraine targeted Kyiv along with 47 of 55 Russian missiles some of which were fired from Tu95 strategic bombers in the Russian Arctic.

As people headed to work, sirens blared, spurring crowds to take cover in underground metro stations. The strikes, spanning eleven regions, hit apartment blocks, twisting corrugated metal, crumpling masonry and creating craters. Missiles damaged energy facilities in Odesa, the Black Sea port that UNESCO designated a "World Heritage in Danger" site. "What we saw today, new strikes on civilian Ukrainian infrastructure, is not waging war, it's waging war crimes" stated French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna.

The Russian anti-ship missiles were designed to sink aircraft carriers, not aim for civilian apartment blocks. Moscow is responsible for dead, maimed and missing civilians in Ukraine. Terrorism has become Russia's driving force of intimidating imperialism. Wagner Group mercenaries have been exceedingly helpful to Russia's cause of  'protecting' Russian minorities living in the Soviet Union's former satellite countries.

 

Mikhael Klimentyev/Sputnik

 

Nothing deters Vladimir Putin, nothing gives him second thoughts, not even the perishability of his own servicemen, sacrificed to his ambition to the tune of up to 500 succumbing daily to the Ukrainian resistance along the 850-mile front line. "They just throw in bodies until something collapses. Their equipment is crap, their weapons are crap, but these human waves are killing us", stated Dan Bilak, Canadian lawyer turned Ukrainian territorial defence soldier.

 

Nina Kovalenko, 66, crying over the body of her son Mykhailo Kovalenko, 36, who was killed in a strike on Saturday in Kostyantynivka, in eastern Ukraine.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Rumours are afloat now of a new Russian offensive coming from Belarus where a buildup of troops and equipment is currently underway, presumably to aim at western Ukraine, its goal to cut off supply routes for NATO arms entering from Poland, and in the process prepare for a new assault on Kyiv. Vladimir Putin is anxious to achieve a resounding victory, sick of the humiliations Ukraine has delivered to him on the battlefield.

Should events turn in Mr. Putin's favour, Moldova, Georgia, the Baltic republics and Eastern Europe countries have good reason to tremble in anticipation of a replay on their own soil.  In the pursuit of his mission, the President of Russia has engaged the world with few exceptions in a new phenomenon of Russiaphobia. Vladimir Putin is more comfortable basking in sycophantic admiration than he is in isolation.

He is a master of the unpredictable. Russia's possession of nuclear arms ensures that the suspense and fear of hasty decision-making in a frenzy of frustration and anger could lead him to errors of  judgement. The fact that twenty-five countries are firmly aligned against his ambitions to the extent of pledging and providing financial and materiel support to Ukraine at this juncture in tense history foretells Russia's fate, win or lose. 

A Ukrainian serviceman gets ready to fire with a mortar from a position not far from Bakhmut, Donetsk region on Jan. 27, 2023, amid Russian invasion of Ukraine.