From the failed Russian 'ride' on Kyiv to the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south

They say that on the night of February 24, the bars of Kyiv were still packed.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
23 August 2022 Tuesday 23:30
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From the failed Russian 'ride' on Kyiv to the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south

They say that on the night of February 24, the bars of Kyiv were still packed. The CIA had been warning of an "imminent" Russian invasion for weeks, but the Ukrainian government dismissed these warnings as "alarmist" despite the fact that, on the other side of the border, there were more than 100,000 soldiers deployed. That morning the Russian troops crossed the divide and the party was over. Six months later, the war continues and there is nothing to predict an end soon.

In the early hours of February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the start of a "special military operation" in Ukraine with the aim of "denazifying" the neighboring country and stopping the "genocide" of the Russian-speaking population. That same night the bombardments begin on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. The bombs kill a hundred people as announced by the Ukrainian president Volodímir Zelenski, who decrees martial law and asks for international help.

During the first weeks of the conflict, the Russian troops managed to advance until reaching the gates of Kyiv. Putin and his advisers thought the trip to the capital would be a walk, but they soon collide with reality. The Ukrainian army resists and will be able to repel them. Their withdrawal exposes the hell experienced by the civilians trapped behind the Russian line. Especially in the city of Bucha, occupied for more than a month. On April 1, the Ukrainian forces encounter a Dantesque scenario. Corpses in the streets, open mass graves and endless stories of rapes, torture, executions, looting...

In one of his most audacious blows for its symbolic and strategic value, on April 13 two Ukrainian missiles sink the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian navy in the Black Sea. The Russian Defense Ministry continues to deny that it was an attack and the death toll is unknown. Apart from being a humiliation for the powerful Russian navy, the sinking makes the rest of the ships more vulnerable, who lose the protection of the only ship in the fleet that had long-range air defenses.

On May 12, the UN announces that more than six million Ukrainians, 90% women and children, have left the country because of a conflict responsible for the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War. In addition, in the interior of the country there are more than eight million internally displaced persons.

The besieged city falls into Russian hands on May 17 after a martyrdom of almost three months. It is unknown how many civilians and soldiers died under the Russian bombs, whose targets included a maternity hospital and a theater converted into a shelter on which the word "children" had been written to prevent a massacre. In the end, the only area of ​​the port city left to control was the gigantic Azovstal steel plant. Thousands of civilians and soldiers took refuge and resisted for weeks in its tunnels, with hardly any food or medicine. On May 17, Zelensky considers the "combat mission" accomplished and the evacuation of Ukrainian soldiers begins, who are taken to territory controlled by Russia.

The Russian withdrawal after withdrawing from the outskirts of Kyiv to focus on the eastern territories of the country achieved significant success on June 24 with the seizure, after a month of siege, of Severodonetsk, a key city to control the Donbass region.

On June 29, during the NATO summit in Madrid, Finland and Sweden definitively bury the strategy of neutrality and formally receive the invitation to join the Alliance, as they had requested. A blow to Putin, who turned Ukraine's intention to enter the club into a casus and will now share 1,300 more kilometers of its border with the organization.

The war in Ukraine risks generating a global food crisis. The bombs fall on the breadbasket of Europe, on whose cereal crops millions of people depend for their survival. On July 22, Kyiv and Moscow sign an agreement so that the grain can leave the Ukrainian ports, blocked by the Russian Navy, and supply the silos of half the world through a maritime corridor.

In recent weeks, Kyiv has been preparing for what it says will be a counteroffensive in the south. Last week, the Crimean authorities declared a state of emergency after explosions were registered in several strategic points of the occupied peninsula. There have also been attacks on magazines in the Russian region of Belgorod and even guerrilla actions in occupied Kherson.

Moscow has accused an alleged Ukrainian agent of planting the bomb that blew up the car of Daria Duguina, daughter of the influential ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin. Dugin has been one of the thinkers who has most defended the invasion of Ukraine, although he is not considered a "Kremlin" philosopher.