There would be five times more casualties on the Russian side, according to Zelensky. It is rare for the president to talk about defeats of the Ukrainian team, but he attracted the attention of the media, so he could not avoid it this weekend.
Also The New York Times wrote about it on Saturday. The newspaper visited the Kherson front in the south, where the Ukrainian advance is “painfully slow” and accompanied “by great losses”. It could be the most heartbreaking battle fought in Ukraine, the newspaper said. The New York Times they spoke of soldiers who lost “fifty men in two hours” or “hundreds” in a failed attempt to liberate a village. However, Ukraine has no choice but to continue the attack, Ukrainian officials say.
One reason for continuing to fight with greater haste are the referendums that Russia will hold until Tuesday in the conquered areas of Kherson, Luhansk, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhya. US President Joe Biden and many others have already condemned those referendums, calling them “a farce”.
The result is predetermined
The British BBC showed footage of pro-Russian officials, accompanied by armed soldiers, going door-to-door in the occupied city of Kherson to force people to complete the referendum. Nobody opens.
This does not discourage Russia. After Tuesday, all the conquered territories should be formally annexed by the Kremlin to Russia, because the outcome of the referendums seems to be predetermined. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced on Saturday that those results will be made official immediately after Tuesday and that from then on, all areas annexed to Russia will become part of the Russian Federation. They are therefore “under the full protection of the state”.
Lavrov suggested that the use of nuclear weapons was also a possibility, if Ukraine tried to liberate those areas after all. The Russian minister spoke to the press in New York after a speech at the UN General Assembly.
Long lines at the border
It is feared that after Tuesday Ukrainians in annexed areas will also be forced to serve in the Russian army, as part of the ‘partial mobilization’ of 300,000 reserve soldiers. This mobilization is difficult. More and more videos are appearing on the Internet of long traffic jams at the borders where Russian men try to escape from the mobilization. They are trying to reach Georgia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia before Russia closes these escape routes.
Russians who protest against forced mobilization in their own country are often arrested. According to the human rights channel OVD-Info On Saturday alone, 798 people were arrested by the police.
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