Barely eight years old, Volodymyr, a boy from the Ivano-Frankivsk region in the far west of Ukraine, has turned. Like many of his peers in our country, he celebrated his last birthday with a cake with figures from the popular animated series. Paw Patrol.
But there will be no ninth birthday. Volodymyr died Friday when the neighborhood where he lived was hit by a Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missile. However, the house of his parents, who were injured in the attack, is almost 1,000 kilometers from the front. But Volodymyr had the “bad luck” – as cynical as that sounds – to live near an airfield where the Russian military believed to be home to Ukrainian pilots who will soon begin their F-16 training abroad.
The attack on Ivano-Frankivsk was by no means the only one in which civilians fell victim to Russian terror this week. Day after day, night after night, Ukrainian cities were bombed. In Pokrovsk, 9 people were killed and nearly 100 injured when a so-called ‘double tap’ attack took place in a residential area. With this controversial tactic, after a first attack, a time is deliberately waited for rescuers to be present at the scene of the attack, after which a second attack is launched. That way, the human toll is maximized, a gruesome technique that the Russians learned from the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war.
The city of Zaporizhia in eastern Ukraine will also be hit hard. On Wednesday, three people died in a rocket attack, including two girls aged just 19 and 21 who were playing music in the street for passers-by. A day later, 66-year-old teacher Natalia Tereshenko was killed in a bombing raid on a hotel in the city center often used by journalists and UN staff to shelter war victims.
Images filmed from an adjacent park where children are playing show how the second rocket flies over and hits. Panic breaks out, children begin to cry. This is Europe, 2023.
Who is stopping Russian President Putin? According to the United Nations, attacks on such civilian infrastructure are in violation of international humanitarian law, the organization called on Russia – which is a member of the Security Council of the same organization – to “immediately stop arbitrary attacks on Ukraine”.
But many fail to make such calls, which have already been made hundreds of times. Some hopes were pinned on China, which was present at the peace summit in Saudi Arabia last week, but that did not become very concrete. For now, there is no sign whatsoever that Russia will settle for less than the full surrender of Ukraine in the long run. It was literally pronounced this week by former president Dmitry Medvedev. The Russian rulers simply deny the existence of an independent Ukrainian state.
In that light, after a year and a half of war, there is still a reluctance to give Ukraine the weapons it needs to expel the Russian army from the country, is almost incomprehensible. The fear of offending Putin and his ‘escalation’ is too great. But what do you call attacks like those of last week on civilian targets? How many dead children and other civilians are acceptable not to snub Putin?
For example, Germany is still hesitant to supply Taurus long-range missiles as long as the United States does not send ATACMS missiles, for fear that Ukraine would hit Russian territory with them. However, the British and French Storm Shadow missiles have shown in recent weeks how important attacks on Russian logistics lines can be in trying to straighten out the stalled Ukrainian offensive. Attacks on Russian ships and ports should further disrupt Russian supply lines.
And what about our own help? This week it became known that another country has bought 50 old Belgian Leopard 1 tanks for Ukraine, which we ourselves disposed of ten years ago. Belgium itself did not want to buy them back from OIP Land Systems in Tournai because we thought they were too expensive. But apparently another European country didn’t think so, or could negotiate a better price. In both cases, Belgium does not exactly look good.
The F-16 training also runs smoothly and the Western countries keep looking at each other. Europe is looking to the US for permission to supply the devices, the US is waiting for concrete plans from Europe. Meanwhile, it appears that the English language training for Ukrainian pilots has yet to start, which jeopardizes the entire planning. Mid-2024 is currently being put forward as a possible date on which the F-16s could be deployed over Ukraine.
British investigative journalist John Sweeney, who lives in Ukraine and was recently interviewed in this newspaper, could not hide his anger on Saturday. “America’s unspoken policy is to support Ukraine to survive, but not to win,” he captioned a video on Twitter. “Fear of the chaos in Russia after Putin. This is appeasement politics 2.0.”
On the front itself, the Ukrainian soldiers, meanwhile, remain determined to defeat the Russians in the long term. “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon,” they say. But Lieutenant Colonel Tom Simoens – as an outside observer – nevertheless appears pessimistic. “I think there is only a 10 to 20 percent chance that Ukraine can make a breakthrough in even one place in the next two months,” he said in an interview this weekend. In the northeast of Ukraine, it is even Russia that is once again on the offensive.
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