Vladimir Putin’s forces attacked the center of Kiev in the early hours of Saturday (26). The battle for Ukraine’s capital comes just two days after the start of the war with which the Russian president intends to overthrow the government and regain political control over his neighbour.
“Ukraine’s future is at stake,” said Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president who is said to have been marked as “Target No. European.
As might be expected, details of the Russian action are sparse. The first explosions in peripheral points of the city were reported around 5:00 am local time (midnight in BrasÃlia). According to the Facebook account of the local Armed Forces, there was fighting in regions as central as Avenida da Vitória in the early morning.
The British government, which has a vested interest in being a rival to Moscow, says the Ukrainians are resisting and that so far the fighting has only involved vanguard Russian special forces. Also questioned were the advances claimed by the Kremlin in other parts of the country, such as the conquest of Melitpol (south).
“We cannot lose the capital. I speak to our defenders, men and women on all fronts: tonight, the enemy will use all its forces to break through our defenses in the most vile, harsh and inhumane way,” Zelensky said in a statement. done before the attack.
He called for resistance and directed residents of the city of 3 million to throw Molotov cocktails at the invaders. The government published videos teaching how to make the improvised pump with gasoline in bottles, and during Friday (25th) it distributed 18,000 rifles to civilians.
In mid-morning, Zelensky appeared in a video recorded on his cell phone in the center of the city to dispel rumors that he had fled, saying that “we are not going to lay down weapons”. Constant on camera, his medium of origin, later spoke to the press, saying that “we are going to win” and that the resistance was working and that the invasion had “gone off the rails”.
“I want everyone in Russia to hear me. Hundreds of soldiers captured here don’t know why they were sent to kill people or be killed,” he said, without providing evidence of his claims.
According to information from Russian military analysts, the center of the attack is the northwest region of the capital. Russia landed an uncertain number of military personnel at Antonov airport in Hostomel (25 km from the city). The report is that there was resistance.
They could have come either from the Belarusian dictatorship, where Russia deployed around 30,000 troops in military exercises that were supposed to end on Sunday, or from the base of the 76th Airborne Division in Pskov (900 km to the north).
The entry base was Hostomel. As the siege of the capital consolidated on two fronts, along the sixth, Russian scouts were seen on the outskirts of Kiev, including with light armored vehicles. It was recognition for the battle ahead, in a war that followed in other parts of the country on Saturday: bombings were heard near cities such as Lviv and Kharkiv.
The other flank of the attack is northeast of the city. The Russians took over the region of the Chernobyl plant, the scene of the biggest nuclear accident in history, in 1986, from the fifth (24th) to the sixth. From there, 110 km from Kiev, they established a corridor for military and armored personnel coming from Belarus through the frozen swamps of Pripriat.
TV footage showed an apartment building hit by a shell, but there was no immediate information about casualties.
According to Ukrainian forces, a first attack on the heart of the city was repelled, probably with the intensive use of Javelin anti-tank missiles, provided as part of the US$400 million package offered by the US government in 2021. crisis and the imminence of the attack, President Joe Biden promised to release an additional $350 million in American weapons to fight the Russians.
This last formulation gives the geopolitical dimension of what is at stake. Putin used as justification for the invasion the need to protect the two self-proclaimed Russian republics of Donbass (east of the country), which he recognized as countries on Monday (21).
The Kremlin has supported the rebels since 2014, when an allied government in Kiev was overthrown and replaced by a Western-backed one, opening the door for Ukraine to join NATO (Western military alliance) and the European Union.
Putin’s reaction was to annex Crimea, the precious historically Russian peninsula that is home to his Black Sea Fleet, which then leased its base in Sevastopol. Support for the rebels came, but annexation plans did not go ahead. From a strategic point of view, however, keeping the conflict that killed more than 14,000 people frozen was enough for Putin, because he kept Ukraine powerless to join the West.
Thus, Putin would not see offensive Western forces at his doorstep, nor a liberal regime that could inspire opposition at home.
In 2021, the Russian seems to have decided to end the game. After a rehearsal in April, from November it mobilized between 150,000 and 190,000 troops in exercises denounced in the West as a harbinger of invasion and issued an ultimatum for the US and NATO to accept its design for Eastern Europe, ceasing expansion. from the military club that had already absorbed 14 former communist satellites, 3 of them countries that were from the Soviet Union as well as Ukraine.
Despite the outcry, the West remained with its hands tied, fearful of involving NATO in a potentially nuclear conflict with the Russians, as the Russian president always remembers. He has put together successive sanctions packages, the most recent aimed at hitting Putin personally for the first time, but the long-lived Kremlin leader, in power since 1999, has not moved.
On the streets of Russian cities and around the world, as well as on the internet, protests against the war erupted, including by celebrities from Putin’s country. No effect so far, although it foreshadows the isolation of the Kremlin regime.
When the first ballistic and cruise missiles were dropped over Ukraine in the early hours of Thursday, the Russian sealed his biggest bet, which had been rehearsed in the five-day war against Georgia for the same reasons in 2008 and in the 2014 action in Georgia itself. Ukraine.
Militarily, the reform it undertook after its poor performance in 2008 and the practical experience in the Syrian civil war, in which it intervened in 2015 and saved the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship, gave the Kremlin a more effective force and dominance over modern air warfare. that didn’t have.
The multiple attack across the country and the arrival at the center of power in three days shows that the investment has paid off. Ukraine resists, but the disproportion of forces is blatant. In all, Putin has 900,000 troops and a military budget ten times that of Zelensky, who commands 200,000 troops.
Kiev thus faces the tenth major battle in its long history, which began in the 5th century. Alive in the memories of older residents and their descendants are two, the Nazi assault of 1941, which left the city under brutal occupation, and the Soviet takeover of 1943, for many ushered in a period as dark as the previous one.
Also on Saturday, the government in Lviv (west of the country, next to Poland) said that the attack by a unit with 60 paratroopers near the city had been repelled. Ukraine also claims it shot down two Il-76 heavy transport planes, which will be a major setback for Putin if confirmed. The Russians reported a list of 821 military targets hit, in addition to dozens of planes, tanks and other equipment. None of the claims are verifiable.
On Friday, Putin’s objective was clear on the ground and also in the speech. Zelensky mumbled the idea of ​​discussing Ukrainian neutrality and was met with sarcasm: Moscow said it was ready to negotiate, as long as it was in the allied capital Minsk and on its terms. I wanted surrender.
Putin even went so far as to launch a scathing attack on the Ukrainian, calling his government a hotbed of drug addicts and neo-Nazis, an accusation that has permeated this campaign from the beginning, as well as side-by-side references to World War II — the current conflict is the largest in Europe since the end of hostilities in 1945.
Zelensky is Jewish, but the current idea in Russia is that the actual association of Nazi elements in the more radical nationalism of the neighbor is equivalent to government policies.
That’s why the Russian talks about fighting a genocide, presumably in his rhetoric of the 4 million residents of Donbass, 800,000 of whom he granted passports. There is none of that, but an open cultural clash, in which Kiev sought to impose the Ukrainian language, born with Russian but different from it, in the country.
Statements by Russian officials such as Chancellor Sergei Lavrov made it clear that Zelensky would only have the option of surrendering for trial or resisting and dying. In the early hours of the morning, the Washington Post newspaper said that the US had offered him refuge, with no positive response.
The Russian plan, according to Moscow diplomats and analysts, is to install a regime that supports Moscow, perhaps with a pro-Russian party politician. There is the possibility of a military occupation, which would entail enormous costs and risks, but Putin has shown that he is willing to do that with war.
A comedian who emerged from a TV show in which he played a professor who accidentally became president of Ukraine, Zelensky came to power in 2019 in a surprising way.
He uses his qualities as an actor in speeches, posing his voice and claiming the traditional “Glory to Ukraine” at the end of his speeches. Lacking political experience, he was unable to conduct a cohesive negotiation with rival domestic groups to deal with Putin, and took steps that defied the Kremlin.
Without objective military support, which he would never have from the West, he now goes from comedy to tragedy, risking becoming a martyr in the script in which he exchanged the meta-life of a TV character for the cornered character of shaky internet videos in a city under fire. War has reached the 21st century.
