Even if an average European, sipping morning coffee with a croissant, notices news reports about the destroyed high-rise buildings and burning schools in Kharkiv, it is unlikely to leave a significant impression on him, as it concerns an unknown city that is located far away. However, Kharkiv is the second most populous city in Ukraine, with a population of 1.5 million. Thus, an average European can easily imagine comparable cities such Munich (1.5 million people), Marseille (1.6 million people), or Barcelona (1.6 million people). On the other hand, imagining how children are joyfully playing football on a school stadium in Marseille and suddenly an offensive drone or a ballistic missile strikes that very place would be extremely unpleasant.
On March 27, Russian troops once again struck Kherson (279,000 people) in broad daylight, attacking the train station and surrounding infrastructure, as well as the city center. Two people waiting at a public transport stop were killed instantly, and others were hospitalized.
The day before, on March 26, Russian kamikaze drones massively attacked exclusively residential buildings in Kharkiv, where there have never been any military units or factories. As a result, fires raged in the city all night, several apartment buildings were damaged, and about twenty civilians were injured, among them a 5-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl.
On the same day, Dnipro that is the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of nearly 1 million inhabitants and a major scientific, research, and industrial centre known as Ukraine’s space capital was attacked by drones and ballistic missiles. As a result of that attack, several residential buildings, 60 private cars, educational institutions were destroyed, and three civilians sustained serious injuries.
On March 24, in broad daylight, Russians launched a missile strike on the centre of Sumy (with 256,000 residents), resulting in 108 people being seriously injured, including 23 children. A vast number of completely civilian objects which have no relation to combat activities sustained significant damage, three residential buildings were entirely destroyed, and over 3,000 windows were shattered by the blast wave.
It should also be emphasized that populated areas in frontline regions suffer not only from missiles and drones, which threaten the entire territory of Ukraine, but also from GABs and Russian long-range artillery. This pertains to the Kharkiv, Sumy, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, where private homes, schools, kindergartens, businesses, and farms are destroyed daily.
At the same time, the war in Ukraine is happening, in fact, not far from the EU, but right along its eastern borders. For instance, a flight from Kyiv to Paris takes only three hours, whereas a flight from London to Lisbon takes an average European five hours. Therefore, the high-intensity combat that has been ongoing in Eastern Europe for three years significantly affects the situation across the entire European continent in one way or another, and while ordinary residents may not notice this fact, political leaders in most EU countries, the UK, Norway, Iceland, and Switzerland are eager for a swift end to the war.
Paradoxically, not all Western politicians, particularly in the U.S., fully realize that the war was started by Russia with its unprovoked large-scale invasion of Ukraine, and that it is precisely the Russian Federation that can end the war.
However, as the last few weeks have shown, Moscow is not interested in ending the war, as Russian delegations only participate formally in talks brokered by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, demonstrating an unyielding position and presenting Kyiv with deliberately unrealistic demands that, de facto, signify complete capitulation. And while agreement has been reached to ban strikes on energy and civilian infrastructure, Russian troops continue permanent air attacks on Ukraine, which particularly affect the critical infrastructure of large cities and the civilian population.
For instance, all Ukrainians were shocked by the news that on March 23 a 5-year-old girl and her father were killed (while her mother was hospitalized in serious condition) in a drone attack on Kyiv and they were internally displaced persons from the frontline areas of the Zaporizhzhia region. In another area, an elderly woman was burned alive in a fire broke out after a drone strike armed with a thermobaric warhead. On March 25, a 3-year-old child and her 36-year-old mother were killed in a bomb attack on the village of Kurytivka in the Donetsk region.
Ukrainians have been reading through a stream of similar news daily for the past three years. It would be absurd to think that, under these conditions, the citizens of Ukraine do not want an immediate end to the war! However, they seek not a temporary ceasefire, but a lasting peace based on justice, international law and respect for the principles of inviolability of borders and territorial integrity of states.
From its side, the leadership of Russia relies not so much on the victory of its own troops on the battlefield, but on the method of terrorist pressure on the entire territory of Ukraine through permanent air attacks that ruthlessly destroy critical infrastructure and lead to significant casualties among civilians. The Kremlin assumes that Ukrainian people either flee to Europe or resort to political turmoil, demanding that official Kyiv immediately cease resistance to the aggressor and conclude a peace agreement with Moscow on any terms, that, in fact, means Ukraine’s capitulation to Russia.
The masters of the Kremlin believe that by continuing to kill peaceful Ukrainians, including children, they will break the spirit of struggle, the willpower and the desire for freedom of the Ukrainian political nation, regardless of the ethnic origin of its representatives and the language of their everyday communication. Currently, Putin’s goal is not to quickly capture Kharkiv, Sumy, Dnipro, and other major Ukrainian cities (as he hopes to do all that later), but to force Ukrainians into ‘peace’ in the exact sense that Moscow puts into that word, rather than Kyiv and its Western allies.
By the word ‘peace’ the Kremlin means the resignation of President Zelensky and the coming people who would agree to the annexation of Crimea, Sevastopol, the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, which have already been included in the Constitution of the Russian Federation, to power in Kyiv, and ultimately, the entry of a puppet and diminished Ukraine into the Union State of Russia and Belarus, as well as the Eurasian Economic Union.
Therefore, Putin has ordered not only to fight the enemy’s army but also to carry out genocide of the Ukrainian nation by all available means in pursuing his aim. As the Kremlin is convinced, the more Ukrainian citizens become refugees in EU countries, the better it will be for the future occupying authorities. Other Ukrainians would put pressure on Kyiv to sign a capitulation. Thus, while the West wants Moscow to conclude a peace agreement with Kyiv as soon as possible on mutually acceptable terms, Russia clearly prefers to continue committing war crimes.
