NATO is evaluating the possibility of sending instructors to Ukraine to train Kiev’s soldiers. It is the New York Times that reveals this step forward by the Westerners, in an increasingly complicated phase of the war for the defense forces in the face of the Russian advance. This initiative, the American newspaper underlines, would push the United States and Europe to become more involved in the conflict. So far Washington has said no to this hypothesis but the chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown Jr, explained that a deployment of instructors from the Atlantic Alliance appears inevitable. Moscow instead warned the United States that it will use “more powerful weapons” if Ukraine attacks its cities with US-supplied missiles. A quick response to the authorization granted by the Americans to Kiev to use the long-range carriers supplied by Washington also to strike deep into Russian territory.
And an endorsement that followed that already expressed by Great Britain as a response to an increasingly precarious situation on the ground for the Ukrainians. The warning of a possible uncontrolled escalation came from Vyacheslav Volodin, president of the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, after yesterday the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, visiting Kiev, said that Ukraine “must take decisions alone” on how to use the weapons arriving from the United States.
Among these, the Atacms long-range missiles. More or less the same words were used a couple of weeks ago by the British Foreign Minister, David Cameron. On that occasion, Moscow responded that it reserved the right to respond to London-supplied Storm Shadow attacks with bombing of British targets “in Ukraine and beyond”. A sign of the new tensions between Moscow and London was also the expulsion of the Russian defense attaché from the embassy in the United Kingdom, to which Russia responded today with an equal and opposite measure. It is not clear which “more powerful weapons” Volodin is referring to, but it is inevitable that thoughts also turn to nuclear warheads. Kiev, the Duma speaker warned, is trying to drag the USA and European countries into a “big war”. For now, American and British carriers are used by Kiev mainly for attacks on Crimea. The Russian Defense Ministry said five Atacms were shot down in the past 24 hours on the peninsula annexed in 2014 by Moscow.
But in recent months, Ukrainian forces have increasingly relied on drone attacks on Russian territory even several hundred kilometers from the border, as well as continuous bombing on the border regions of Belgorod and Bryansk, in an attempt to put Moscow in difficulty , albeit slowly, continues to penetrate enemy lines in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky today went to Kharkiv, whose region has been the scene of a new Russian offensive for a week, to assure that the situation “is generally under control”, even if it remains extremely difficult. But former Moscow Defense Minister Serghei Shoigu said the advance of Russian troops continues “in all directions” and is going “quite well.” According to an analysis by the AFP agency, Russian forces conquered 278 square kilometers of territory in seven days, mostly in the Kharkiv region. It’s the biggest advance in a year and a half. But according to the Ukrainians, and also according to various observers in Moscow, the real objective of the invasion from the north-eastern border could be to force Kiev to send reinforcements towards Kharkiv by weakening the defenses in Donbass, especially in Donetsk, which Moscow seems to intend to take entirely under his control.
And some also hypothesize that Russia wants to gain new territories to use them as a bargaining chip in future negotiations, being little interested in territories that it would then have difficulty controlling. This strategy would concern the Kharkiv region, in fact, and that of Sumy, further to the north-west, where the bombings are intensifying in view of a next feared advance. A woman died and another person was injured yesterday in attacks on the latter region, according to the local military administration. Ukrainian sources said that the head of the military administration was injured in the bombing in the Kharkiv region, in the town of Vovchansk. In the same location police accused Russian soldiers of using 35-40 civilians as “human shields”.
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