For days, Ukraine has received messages from Western secret services that sound somewhat encouraging – if one can even speak of encouragement in this barbaric war. It is predicted that the Russian army will soon have to take a “pause in action”, that it will “run out of breath”, that it will lack soldiers and material – and that Putin will not achieve his war goals in the foreseeable future. These – admittedly uncertain – predictions from London and Washington are mixed with success reports from Kyiv, according to which the most recent deliveries of heavy weapons, such as American rocket launchers, have enabled the Ukrainian defenders to inflict heavy losses on the Russians.
What has not yet come true are the announcements by the Ukrainian president that his troops would make strategic gains and liberate occupied territory in the south around Kherson and the Zaporizhia region. Military successes would be particularly important now, precisely where the terror regime of the Russian occupiers led to torture, mass deportations and forced Russification.
Far more than a million people have already been kidnapped to Russia. The Russian leadership speaks of “evacuees,” thereby confirming a crime that finds surprisingly little response from all those who still think that negotiations should be negotiated with Vladimir Putin, that the Ukrainians should Giving up areas, making compromises. In addition to the expulsion to the west, the deportations to the east caused the greatest human suffering in this war. The occupied territories are administered by Moscow as if locked away from the world; in Russia nobody cares about the fate of the victims in Mariupol, Melitopol or Nowa Kakhovka. Some of the abducted people are displayed like cattle by Russian propaganda: look who we saved from the fascists here.
Every square kilometer that the Ukrainian troops could take back would therefore also be vital. But apart from smaller gains in terrain, little has changed in the past few weeks. When Volodymyr Zelenensky again emphasizes that the Ukrainian army has the potential to reconquer territory and repulse the occupiers, this can certainly be attributed to comfort and motivation on the one hand; the war has already lasted five months, the emotional strain is hard to bear. In his most recent appeal, which was aimed at both his compatriots and Western partners, Zelenskiy once again named the second reason himself: Every bomb on Ukrainian cities is an “argument for more, more modern and more effective” weapons. And it’s also true: the recently delivered, state-of-the-art artillery has put the Russian army under heavy pressure along, but especially behind the front; it enabled counter-attacks and aroused hope.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has now announced that the Kremlin’s war aims no longer only include the “People’s Republics”, but also the region around Cherson and Zaporizhia. This is necessary because the West is now supplying the government in Kyiv with weapons with ever greater ranges. Lavrov lies when he speaks of “new” goals. But his statements show that the pressure on the Ukrainian army is increasing again.