Ukraine has been expecting the second major wave of Russian attacks against the east of the country for weeks. NOW it started, on Monday evening the Ukrainian general staff announced: Russia has started the expected offensive in the east of the country. BUT: Deep in the west, rockets also surprisingly hit again on Monday.
By Philip Piatov
With that warlord demonstrated Wladimir Putin (69): Ukrainian civilians are NOWHERE safe from him!
Early Monday morning, several Russian rockets landed in Lviv, just a few kilometers from the Polish border. Seven dead, eleven injured!
► After the rocket attack, Russian propaganda cheered about the achievement of “military reconnaissance” – but in reality the projectiles mainly hit civilians and also injured a three-year-old boy.
► The situation is also getting worse in eastern Ukraine. “Signs of the start of the offensive in the Eastern Operational Zone are being noted,” the Ukrainian General Staff said on Monday evening in Kyiv. Advances towards Barvinkove and Sloviansk in the Donetsk region were expected from the town of Izyum, near Kharkiv.
The eastern metropolis of Kharkiv is in the brutal focus of the Kremlin: Several civilians died there on Monday in the constant Russian shelling. Particularly perfidious: the Russians often attack civilian targets several times in a row in order to kill rescue workers as well.
︎ The governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Hajdaj, also spoke of Russian attacks. “The control of the city of Kreminna has just been lost. Street fights are taking place,” he said on Monday evening. An evacuation of the small town is no longer possible. “The situation is getting worse every hour,” Hajdaj said. There is also said to be heavy fighting around the cities of Rubischne and Popasna.
▶︎ “It started,” said Oleksiy Arestovych (46), military adviser to the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy (44), on Monday. And further: “The southern side of the Russian combat group has started to move.”
► The approximately 10,000 Russian soldiers would try to advance from the south to join up with the main force in eastern Ukraine. The goal: the encirclement of tens of thousands of Ukrainian fighters and millions of civilians!
► They seem different than expected Russians not to be stopped by the persistent heavy rain in the front area. The pressure from Moscow to deliver new conquests by the highly symbolic “Victory Day” on May 9 is possibly too great. The loss of the missile cruiser “Moskva” weighs too heavily, which the army wants to make up for with attacks on Ukrainian cities.
►The Kremlin’s top short-term goal: the final conquest of the walled-in coastal city of Mariupol, where the city’s last remaining defenders are holed up in a giant steel mill.
