2024-01-04 20:24:43
Did you miss the latest events on the war in Ukraine? 20 Minutes takes stock for you every evening at 7:30 p.m. Between the strong declarations, the advances on the front and the results of the battles, here are the main points of the day.
The fact of the day
Russia has extended school holidays in schools in Belgorod, hit on Saturday by an unprecedented deadly Ukrainian strike. This is the heaviest death toll in Russia since February 24, 2022, the date the invasion of Ukraine began: 25 dead and around a hundred injured. “I report the decisions that were taken (following a meeting between officials): to extend the school holidays from January 9 to 19,” Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov declared on Telegram, after new strikes. Gladkov did not specify the reasons for this emergency decision but his region seems particularly targeted by Ukrainian reprisals following Russian bombings.
kyiv has said nothing about these bombings on Russian territory but they seem to be part of a new tactic: responding to strikes on Ukrainian cities with strikes on Russian cities. Thus, if the Kremlin has been trying for almost two years to hide the reality of the war from the population, the strike on Belgorod on December 30 showed that Russian territory and civilians could be drawn into the conflict.
Sentence of the day
We don’t have enough (material) to repel them, we saw it during the counter-offensive and, to destroy them, we need three times more because they say that if we attack we need three times more soldiers. »
These are the words of Alexandr Dolgopolov, Ukrainian tennis player turned soldier, who gave a telephone interview to AFP. This decision to commit was obvious for the former quarter-finalist of the Australian Open, who defeated Rafael Nadal in 2014 at Indian Wells: “It’s my country, I think we have to do something. » The one who rose to thirteenth place in the world and accumulated more than 7 million dollars (around 6.5 million euros) in winnings during his career also evokes “the courage of his people” and the pride of “fight on the right side to defend what is yours”, against “the barbarity of the enemy”.
The number of the day
4. This is the number of main border crossings between Poland and Ukraine which remained blocked to truck traffic after the blocking of the last crossing by Polish farmers resumed in the morning. The latter say they are still suffering from the fall in prices resulting from Ukrainian grain imports early last year and are demanding subsidies and cheap loans. They indicated that the blockade would continue until February 3.
Today’s trend
The recent massive Russian strikes against major Ukrainian cities aim, according to experts, to exhaust the population and the anti-aircraft defense of Ukraine, which has once again requested more weapons from its Western allies. Moscow is seeking to start a race against time, hoping that “Ukraine will run out of interceptors before Russia runs out of missiles and drones,” notes this retired Australian general on X (ex-Twitter ).
Russia has moved into a war economy, while the West is struggling to supply the necessary quantity of surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles, which are much more complex and costly to manufacture than certain drones built partly from civilian equipment. The main target of Russian strikes is as such “the defense industry” which kyiv is trying to strengthen in the face of declining Western arms deliveries, analyzes the British Ministry of Defense. And to achieve these targets, “the sequencing and mixing of Russian projectiles have changed, they have become more complex,” explains Stéphane Audrand, French consultant in international risks. The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army described on Telegram the range of projectiles used by the Russians during the January 1-2 attack: drones, modern cruise missiles, older ones and ballistic missiles.
The objective of Russian strikes is also, as since the start of the war in February 2022, to undermine the morale of the population. “’I will not give up, I am ready for anything, you will suffer without respite and die if you do not comply with my conditions’ – this is the message from Vladimir Putin,” analyzes Tatiana Kastouéva-Jean, of the French Institute of International Relations.
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