Ukrainian artillerymen in the eastern trenches – Reuters
The Russian artillery attack on the eastern Ukrainian front has increased in intensity in the last few hours. A frenzied action conducted in the hope of breaking through the Ukrainian lines and bringing down the front, forcing Kiev to reorganize the defenses by causing the battalions to retreat for tens of kilometers. Militarily it would be a catastrophe. Politically, a defeat. Having to face the worst of eventualities, the race to deliver Western weapons is at breakneck speed. Vladimir Putin needs to show off the scalp of Kiev tomorrow, the day on which he celebrates his victory over Nazi-fascism. The Avdiivka region may be too little, after two years of war. The fear that keeps civilians and soldiers awake is for large-scale action, with an unprecedented barrage of attacks from the air, to open a gap for ground forces, along the 1,000-strong front in the south and east, where the Kremlin could attempt an assault on some of the last major cities in the industrialized Donetsk region, marking the acquisition of political and economic spoils.
According to Rob Lee, of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), Russian surveillance drones “often represent a greater risk to Ukrainian artillery units than Russian counter-battery radars”, he explained to the Reuters agency. Unmanned aerial vehicles now have a dual function: first to map the terrain and then to strike. Even if intercepted and destroyed in flight, remote operators manage to acquire the information needed to trace the exact location of the Ukrainian forces, adapting the fighting to the positions on the field. The requests for equipment from Kiev are pressing. Among these are Italian supplies. «All the military equipment we send is intended to be used only within the territory of Ukraine. We do not give material that can be used beyond the borders of Ukraine. We are not at war with Russia”, reassured Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani.
More than two years after the invasion order, we seem to have returned to the tone and tactics preceding the attack on Kiev on 24 February 2022. Then the Russian battalions entered from the North through Belarus, where exercises had been underway for weeks. Moscow at the time assured that its soldiers were there for normal training, not for a real war. He was lying, so the announcement that came yesterday from Minsk is not taken lightly. The Belarusian army has announced that it has started an exercise to verify the degree of “readiness” of its tactical launchers of nuclear weapons. News that comes the day after its ally Russia announced nuclear exercises that would notably involve troops near Ukraine. “A check of the degree of readiness of forces and launchers of tactical nuclear weapons has been initiated within the armed forces,” the Belarusian Defense Ministry said in a statement. In the summer of 2023, Moscow said it had deployed tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. “No one will use these weapons for offensive purposes,” assured Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, quoted by the Interfax agency. The objective for the Minsk autocrat remains that of “deterrence”.
But at this point no one trusts anyone anymore. And yesterday two officials of the State Security Administration, reports Ukrainska Pravda, were reported for treason and complicity in a terrorist attack. One of the tasks of the Russian intelligence network, which according to accusations infiltrated the antechamber of the Ukrainian leaders, was to search among the military close to the president’s security for people who could take the head of state hostage and then kill him. In addition to Zelensky, the Russians intended to eliminate SBU head Vasily Malyuk, Gur head Kirill Budanov and other high-ranking officials.
The line between ground updates and propaganda has long been crossed. And yesterday the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) urged that substantiated information on the alleged use of chemical weapons in Ukraine be shared with its experts. “The information provided so far by both parties is not sufficiently substantiated,” we read in a statement.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian state prosecutors say they examined debris from 21 of about 50 North Korean ballistic missiles launched by Russia between late December and late February in an effort to assess the threat from Moscow’s cooperation with Pyongyang. “About half of the North Korean missiles lost their planned trajectories and exploded in the air,” explains the Kiev Prosecutor General’s Office. Their use, in addition to providing North Korea with the opportunity to test missiles, is favored by Russia, which has adopted measures that will make it more difficult for the United Nations to monitor the sanctions imposed on North Korea in 2006. a group of UN experts had presented a report confirming for the first time how, in violation of sanctions, a North Korean-made ballistic missile known as the Hwasong-11 had struck the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
