It is the eleventh day. In short, the occupiers have a technical advantage, but they are fighting as obtusely as possible while the Ukrainian army fights as professionally as possible with the modest means it has. These two factors counterpoise each other, but the balance of power is slowly changing in favor of Ukraine. Despite the huge losses, the occupier continues to advance wherever they can. Yesterday, the enemy again tried to break into Kiev through Irpen and again unsuccessfully stormed Nikolaev. Right now, Makarov is being shelled again in an attempt to capture the Zhytomyr highway to Kiev. Trying to cut off the Donbass, they are advancing on Izum, where my friends volunteers from the Good news Pentecostal church are taking out refugees directly from under the fire.
Unable to take large cities, the enemy seeks to seize strategic positions and cut communications. Either he succeeds, or he walks into a trap. After all, his own communications are stretched, while ordinary peaceful people have risen to fight – they ruin the roads, burn the wagons, steal or just spoil the equipment, while hungry soldiers are busy looking for food. The war literally became a national war.
The bombardments of cities and the terror of the civilian population in the occupied territories are on the increase. They purposefully target residential areas, try to destroy civilian infrastructure – power plants, warehouses with food. Kharkov is systematically bombed by air and fired by jet systems directly from the territory of Russia, the city is being ruined block by block. There’s already a humanitarian disaster in Irpen and Mariupol. The armament of a huge destructive force - the missiles «Dot-U» and the complex «Tor» is pulled up to Kiev, indicating a firm intention to destroy the city. Only the Ukrainian army can rescue Kiev, Kharkov and other cities from the total destruction, and it has to maneuver constantly against superior forces.
Nevertheless, yesterday Ukrainians set a record in the number of downed aircraft and helicopters, and conducted a successful counterattack near Kharkov, having captured a lot of equipment - another contribution to the rearmament of the Ukrainian army. Now both sides are showing initiative, the struggle is on an equal footing, the Ukrainian army, retreating and counterattacking, retains itself and at the limit of its capabilities retains the front, while the enemy pays for the offensive in deaths of its military units. So far, the Russian army has lost more than half of what the Soviet Union lost during the ten years of the Afghan war.
There is no safe place in Ukraine, any city can be bombed. I admitted the possibility of a large-scale invasion, but I could not imagine that Russian troops would use the same tactics of cities total destruction, as in Chechnya and Syria. I thought they’d just be besieged and extorted by cutting off the lights and the water. It is now clear that the goal of the war is not just a change of power and establishing Russian influence, but the destruction of the country as such. As long as Ukraine resists, the occupiers will simply kill civilians, but should it surrender, it would be even worse – repression, starvation, and forced mobilization to send cannon fodder to war with other European countries. Along with this, there is a realization that it is not just a war between two States, but between civilization and barbarism. It so happened that Ukraine is now protecting not only itself, but also the entire world. Right now, ordinary citizens are blocking the roads, burning the supply cars, and thus changing the whole geopolitical situation in the world. Until recently, the country was not even a subject on the international scene, and now it stops World War III confronting the second world army, while the whole world is watching the outcome of this battle with fear and hope.
However, the question is: what is the point of atrocities against civilians? Why do the occupiers not focus on purely military tasks? While the war is waged between States for some political reason, accidental shelling mostly kills the civilian population. The civil war is bloodier, as ideological opponents are killed mercilessly. Though again, apolitical civilians can stand aside. Now the enemy is waging war not for political reasons, but for metaphysical reasons stemming from the worldview that assumes the entire civilized world is an evil, and Ukraine is offered a choice to either renounce its identity and obey or be destroyed. That is why the bearers of this worldview expected that the inhabitants of Ukraine would greet them as liberators, and when they saw that this was not the case, the entire population of Ukraine began to be perceived as enemies. And no one cares neither about their nationality, nor about the language they speak.
