Russian attacks have targeted this Sunday a Ukrainian military base near the border with Poland that had been used to joint exercises with NATO, what it means the biggest escalation against this region of Lepolis since eighteen days ago the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, decided to invade Ukraine.
The Russian attack on the Ukrainian military base, 40 kilometers from Lepolis, and near the Polish border, some 25 kilometers, killed nine people and injured 57 others, according to a first report from regional military authorities and the mayor of Lepolis. the city, informs Afp.
“Unfortunately, 57 people were injured and hospitalized, nine heroes died,” Maxim Kozitsky, military governor of the Lepolis region, said on Telegram. According to him, 30 missiles were fired at the base“half of which were destroyed” in flight. eight missiles They would have hit the base, according to the regional council of the border city on its website.
For his part, Ukraine’s Defense Minister, Oleksii Reznikov, confirmed on Sunday the attack by the Russian Army on the base where he had “foreign instructors”.
In a message on his Twitter profile, Reznikov said that “Russia has attacked the International Center for Peacekeeping and Security near Lepolis (Lviv),” reports Efe.
“Foreign instructors work here. Information about the victims is being cleared up. This is a new terrorist attack on peace and security.” near the border between the European Union and NATO. Steps must be taken to stop this. Close the skies,” he added, echoing Kiev’s demand to create an exclusion zone over Ukraine, something NATO refuses to do for fear of widening the conflict.
The Yavoriv military base has been used in recent years as a training ground for Ukrainian forces under the supervision of foreign instructors, including Americans and Canadians. It is also where part of the military aid that Western countries deliver to Ukraine arrives.
Today’s attacks come as Russia threatened Saturday with attack Western arms supplies to Ukraineciting man-portable air defense systems and anti-tank missile systems.
The restlessness began to permeate yesterday among the Ukrainians of the west when receiving sporadic missiles, sent from nearby and pro-Kremlin Belarus. In Lepolis, where people no longer even get up at night to hide when hearing anti-aircraft attack sirens, the missiles that began to fall on Lutsk (130 kilometers to the north, near Poland), and on Ivano-Frankivsk ( about 100 to the south, near Moldova).
Today’s attack on the military base west of Lepolis, a city on the border with Poland, is one more step in the escalation of the Russian Army’s attack on Ukraine, which is also increasingly gripping the capital Kiev, from which it is located. about 25 kilometers and moving forward. Russian troops are trying to remove defenses in the west and north of the city to “blockade” it, the Ukrainian government said.
The Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelensky, almost challenged Vladimir Putin in statements to various media: “He will have to raze Kiev and kill its inhabitants if he wants to take it. If it is his goal, let him come.”
That ever-closing siege of the capital was seen this Saturday when Russian forces destroyed the Valsylkiv airport, 40 kilometers, in addition to registering certain advances in the south and east while the diplomatic route does not advance or even runs aground. Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Schol, French Prime Minister and German Chancellor, reported that the chances of a ceasefire aretoday, zero, after having a 75-minute telephone conversation with Putin.
For his part, the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, will organize next week a summit with Scandinavian and Baltic leadersneighbors of Russia, on the sidelines of one of the largest NATO military exercises since the Cold War, which will take place in Norway from Monday.
But everything seems to be played out Kiev, increasingly suffocated by Russian forces, and doomed to a siege that could definitively entrench the conflict, given the Russian inability (or indecision) so far to define it, and counting on the fierce Ukrainian opposition, screwed by the shipments of weapons from the international community, which the Kremlin described this Saturday as “legitimate objectives”, giving them a role as unremarkable.
The siege of Kiev, thus, can be long and bloody, and just as the US president, Joseph Biden, played with the Russians by predicting the invasion, the same resource would now be used by the Ukrainian, Volodimir Zelensky, to warn external observers. : the taking of Kiev will be a bloodbath and quite a trap for Putin, that if he ever believed in recovering the Ukraine for his Great Russia with a quick and sanitized “special operation”, he is going to have to destroy a land that he considers his – that is, self-harm – to return it to his area. of influence and distance it from pro-Western democratic whims.
If they want to carpet Kiev with bombs and simply erase this region, the history of Kievan Rus’, the history of Europe, let them do it, let them in,” Zelensky said. And Putin, indeed, seems to be following that path. So, this Saturday The bombardments of Irpin and Busha, suburbs to the northwest of the capital, intensified, and the Ukrainian Presidency adviser, Mikhailo Podolyak, admitted Russian advances also to the northwest. “The city is besieged,” he concluded. However, he confirmed that “Kiev is a symbol of resistance” that prepares for a “fierce defense”.
Siege of Mariupol
A humanitarian convoy is expected to arrive today in Mariupol, where the situation is “almost desperate” and whose inhabitants have spent days drinking the rain water, according to Doctors Without Borders. Some 1,582 civilians have been killed and buried in mass graves in this strategic port in the southeast, according to AFP from the head of Ukrainian diplomacy.
The NGO assured that the city, of 445,000 inhabitants on the shores of the Sea of Azov, is on the brink of humanitarian catastrophe, without water or electricity -like several towns and entire areas of the center and east of the country-, and with fights between the population to get food. Zelensky assured that Russia is blocking the entry of supplies into Mariupol, which after 12 days of harsh siege has already become a another of the symbols of this invasion.
Ukraine also denounced the bombing of civilian areas in Krivi Rog, Kremenchuk, Nikopol and Zaporizhia, as well as, according to AFP, from a hospital in Mikolaiv, a city near the Black Sea, to the south, between Odessa, which is also supporting Russian aggression, and Kherson, which has already fallen into invader’s hands.
The human drama has no end for the moment in Ukraine, which according to the United Nations has already produced two million internally displaced all of them to the western area, which begins to feel the bombs, and 2.6 million exiles. Of the latter, one and a half million have gone to neighboring Poland
Kiev assured that they have already died in the Russian invasion 79 minors so far, that in Mariupol have died so far 1,582 civilians, and that Ukrainian forces have already put 31 Russian tactical groups out of action, all without verification by impartial observers.
Putin, for his part, denounced that Ukraine carries out “extrajudicial killings of opponents” and“hostage taking as human shields,” according to a Kremlin statement
