PUTIN: UKRAINE TRYING TO 'DESTABILIZE' RUSSIA
"As a result of targeted shelling with the use of rocket and artillery weapons against residential buildings and civilian infrastructure in the Karyzh village ... a third bridge over the Seym River was damaged."Russia's Investigative Committee"We have now achieved an extremely important ideological shift: the naive and illusory concept of so-called ‘red lines’ regarding Russia that dominated the assessments of the war by some of our partners has crumbled these days somewhere near Sudzha [seized Russian town, by Ukraine forces]."Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
A satellite photo from Planet Labs PBC shows a destroyed bridge across the Seim River at the Russian town of Glushkovo, in the Kursk region, on Saturday. (Planet Labs PBC/The Associated Press) |
Russian
President Vladmir Putin, assessing the Kremlin's war against Ukraine,
condemns Kyiv for its 'terrorism' and its hostile intentions toward
Russia leading to 'destabilization'.
Russia's
commitment to its 'special military operation' that really began in
2014 when it 'destabilized' its neighbour by annexing Crimea and most of
the Donbas, since then destroying Ukraine's energy systems, shelling
civilian infrastructure, claiming them to be military bases when its
artillery aims for hospitals, schools, shopping centres, and in its
unabated attacks that are truly war crimes killing thousands while
forcing millions of Ukrainians to become refugees, is affronted when
Ukraine responds.
Ukrainian
forces have opened a new front in Russia's Kursk region, and have now
succeeded in destroying three of the bridges crossing the Seym River in
Western Russia. Kyiv's Kursk invasion has raised the morale of the
population in Ukraine, sick of this war against their nation, raging
over Russia's appropriation of Ukrainian geography.
While
Ukraine celebrates its incursion into Russian territory, eastern
Ukraine is experiencing the real potential to lose the large and
important city of Pokrovsk.
If
the Kursk incursion was a well-planned and -executed scheme to provoke
the Kremlin to ease up around Pokrovsk and dispatch Russian troops to
the Kursk area for a defensive action, that result appears not to have
occurred. Not yet.
Russian
tacticians may yet rethink their refusal to detract from their push
toward Pokrovsk, to secure the entire Donbas region. However, given the
reality of those damaged/destroyed bridges having the potential to trap
Russian forces between the river, the Ukrainian advance and the
Ukrainian border, a mind-changing response may yet occur.
The
situation does appear to be impeding Russia's response to the incursion
of Kursk, launched on August 6. Two videos of bridges over the Seym
being hit were posted by Ukraine's Air Force commander over the weekend.
While Planet Labs PBC published satellite photos of the bridges, The Associated Press confirmed the destruction of a bridge in the town of Glushkovo.
As well, it was confirmed on Monday by a Russian military investigator that Ukraine had "totally destroyed"
one bridge and damaged another two in the area, even as the full extent
of the damage remained unclear. A later analytic investigation
confirmed that the 'damage' is no longer 'unclear', the bridges are
destroyed.
Moreover,
the Ukrainian army since its incursion into the Kursk region has
captured 1,250 square kilometres and along with that, 92 Russian
settlements. In a turnabout, resulting in tens of thousands of Russians
fleeing the encroaching Ukrainian military, finding themselves
experiencing the kind of dislocation that Ukrainians have been subjected
to for several years.
President
Zelenskyy spoke of the operation's aim as that of a buffer zone being
created, one meant to prevent future attacks on his country from across
the border. Russian state news agency TASS,
reported 17 people were killed,140 wounded during the incursion by the
Ukraine military. That too bespeaks, to a much smaller degree, mirroring
in part what Ukrainians have been forced to go through by Russia's
territorial invasion.
Over
the past 24 hours, according to the Russian Ministry of Emergency
Situations, over 500 people had been forced to abandon areas in the
Kursk region; a total of 122,00 Russians have been resettled elsewhere
since the Ukrainian attack. As well, a gigantic fire burned for a third
consecutive day following a Ukrainian drone hit of an oil depot in the
town of Proletarsk, burning across an area of a hectare.
Labels: Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian Military in Kursk, Vladimir Putin's Outrage
<< Home