FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
KIEV – He walked in slippers for ten kilometers and for two days. Without water, without food. In her hand, only a stick to support herself: “I fell twice, but I got up again.” On Monday night a patrol met you along the road: Lidia Stepanivna Lomikovska, 98 years old, arrived alone and on foot from Ocheretyne, the sixth Ukrainian village that the Russians have conquered in recent weeks. «They burned everything. Even my house. I have nothing left. I was scared, I left, I want to go to my son. Something like this hadn’t been seen even in ’41…”. They are breaking through and Lidia escaped just in time, now that Ocheretyne has fallen like Beredychi and all the villages on the front line of Donetsk that the Ukrainians can no longer hold. It’s the fault of American weapons, says an officer: «We’ve been waiting for them for six months. They are stopped in armored cars on the Polish border. Green, without writing. Everyone knows I’m there. But when will they arrive? If you ask a question about what is needed immediately, the answer is: «Everything. But above all the Patriots. There are countries that have very sophisticated defense systems, they no longer do anything with them. Why don’t they give them to us?”. Military spokesman Nazar Voloshyn admits: «We had to retreat so as not to harm civilians even more. They set everything on fire. With the means we have, we try to push them back.”
They are scorched earth, in the literal sense. A drone films the charred buildings of Chasiv Yar, the stronghold where they fought for weeks, and from the sky it is a corpse town. Standing, only one house. The only light in the dark black, the golden dome of the Orthodox church, half destroyed. In the streets, only the ghost of a man wandering disoriented: there were 12 thousand inhabitants and now there are less than 600 left, hidden who knows where. For the Russians, Chasiv Yar is a victory that weighs, perhaps even more than Bakhmut and Avdiivka, because from this hill you can better control the shots on the Ukrainian lines and at the end of the spring the great offensive will be easier — if there is one — towards the Kryvyi Torets and the enemy troops stationed along the river. Times seem to be running out. In April alone, explains Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, there were 3,800 Russian attacks with drones, missiles and aerial bombs. However, numbers are not enough for Serghei Shoigu, Putin’s defense minister: irritated by the slowness of supplies, he asks to “increase the volume and quality of weapons” to strengthen this front and the one around Kharkiv. There is no reason to be complacent, because not all things add up in Moscow, and the war effort weighs heavily: just yesterday Gazprom, the Russian energy ATM, reported losses of 6.4 billion euros on the European oil market and the 2022 explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipeline.
We are preparing for the big push. The Ukrainians, better fortifying the thousand kilometers of front. The Russians, massing new troops on the border. It won’t be a clean war. It is still the drone videos, says Human Rights Watch, that show the worst crimes: on several occasions, the Russians allegedly “executed” at least sixteen enemy soldiers who had surrendered. We also move quickly with weapons: the US State Department claims that the Kremlin has used it “several times” chloropicrin, a pesticide banned under the CWC Chemical Weapons Convention, while he usually fires anti-riot tear gas, another prohibited substance, at the Ukrainian trenches. “We need more strength to stop this terror,” Zelensky invokes. On Tuesday, in the Kiev metro, they renamed the stop that had always been dedicated to Friendship with the Russian People. Since the beginning of the war, 391 addresses have changed license plates. No one is under any illusions: the new names will not be enough to decide the fate.
