Many have been killed and injured in Ukraine after several Russian missile attacks on major cities on Monday morning.
– On the 229th day of this war, they are trying to destroy us and remove us from the face of the earth. They are trying to destroy people sleeping in their homes in Zaporizhzhya and kill people who go to work in Dnipro and Kiev, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskii writes on Telegram.
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BBC reporter Francis Scarr follows Russian state television “so you don’t have to,” as he writes on Twitter.
According to Scarr, Putin held a meeting with the country’s recently “elected” regional governors on Monday morning, as if nothing had happened:
“Business as usual”
– It acts as if it were “business as usual,” writes Scarr.
Tor Bukkvoll, chief researcher of the Norwegian Defense Research Institute, tells Nettavisen that he is not surprised by Putin’s appearance on Russian television on Monday:
– It is very important for Putin. He was taught this through the KGB school: to calm his own population, he should appear as if everything is as usual. It is very deliberate. He sometimes introduces himself as an emotional person, but he often manages to exactly what we see here, to appear as if things are normal, Bukkvoll tells Nettavisen.
Later on Monday, Putin gave another speech. In a low but serious tone, he launched strong accusations against Ukraine, which he accused of several terrorist attacks. He said, among other things, that the explosion on the bridge between the Crimean peninsula and Russia was a terrorist attack behind the Ukrainians.
– If the attacks on Russia continue, the response will be harsh, Putin said in the speech.
He went on to say that long-range missiles hit Ukraine’s energy, military and communications facilities on Monday. However, television images show, among other things, that a park next to a playground was hit.
Bukkvoll is clear that Monday’s attack on Ukraine is a revenge:
– This is the revenge for the explosion of the bridge in the Crimea. Revenge takes this form here because there isn’t much more Russia can do. They lack the military capability to do much more than hit soft targets, at least if they do it quickly. Here there was a need to do it quickly, because there is a strong demand in some parts of Russia that one should not show weakness, but rather react immediately.
Nuclear weapons
– Putin will have to react, and it is not impossible for even more missiles to arrive, but we must be aware that there are not an infinite number of missiles in Russia. They use expensive weapons when using cruise missiles or tactical missiles. But what else should he have done, I don’t know, because they did what they could have done otherwise, militarily. In the end, only nuclear weapons remained, Bukkvoll tells Nettavisen.
– I wasn’t really going to ask, but what is the likelihood of it being used?
– The possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons is there, but Russia is aware that it can have quite serious consequences for itself, and it is uncertain how much they can gain from it purely militarily, concludes Bukkvoll.
