The war in Ukraine will celebrate its sinister anniversary on Friday 24 February. The resistance to the Russian invasion has been going on for 364 days and has achieved many successes. She managed to defend Kyiv, recapture Kherson, and lead a blistering counter-offensive in the fall, among other things. However, in the early days of the conflict, Ukraine faltered, and no one imagined its army holding up against the much better equipped Kremlin troops.
Vladimir Putin’s fateful decision to invade his western neighbor is announced on television at 5:30 a.m. on February 24, 2022. Minutes later, explosions are reported in the country’s main cities, Kiev, Kharkiv and Odessa.
The fall of kyiv expected by the Americans
The Russians are advancing in several directions. Columns of soldiers rush from Belarus towards kyiv, but also in southern Ukraine from Crimea and in the East, from the separatist territories of Donbass. Kremlin troops enter Kherson, a large city in the south of the country, in the afternoon, and arrive at the gates of Kharkiv.
After only three hours of fighting, the Russians seized the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. They also take control of the Crimean Canal, which supplies the peninsula annexed in 2014 with water.
Circumstances on the ground have American intelligence officials saying that kyiv will not hold out for more than 96 hours. Shots are heard in a popular district of the capital, Obolon, and rumors run about the presence of Russian special forces, sent to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Bayraktar anti-tank weapons and drones
Russian airborne troops take off in parallel from Belarus in combat and transport helicopters and seize Hostomel airport, a few dozen kilometers from kyiv. They seek to use it to allow the massive landing of new troops and to seize the capital.
However, Russia fails to acquire total mastery of the sky, to the surprise of observers. As early as February 26, the Institute for the Study of War highlighted the difficulties encountered by the invader, faced with shortages of gasoline. Many blocked Russian convoys are devastated by anti-tank weapons supplied by the United States and Great Britain and the Turkish-made Bayraktar drones.
The Battle of Hostomel Airport
Above all, the Ukrainian resistance to Hostomel prevented Russian reinforcements from arriving by air. If the Kremlin soldiers control the airport, its surroundings are still disputed. Any attempt to land the massive troop transport planes is doomed to failure.
The main error of the Russians seems to have relied on the faulty analysis of their intelligence systems, which estimated that the Ukrainians would quickly side with the aggressor. Starting from this presupposition, the Kremlin preferred to refrain from using its most deadly weapons, in order to maintain the idea of consensual reunification.
——–