On this twenty-second day since the beginning of the conflict, the hope of a peaceful solution still seems unrealistic. On the ground, the fighting continues and the two camps are getting stronger. And the more time passes, the more the rift between Ukrainians and Russians will be irreparable.
Everywhere, missile strikes and indiscriminate bombardments by Russian air force continue, while clashes rage between mobile and tenacious Ukrainian forces and a powerful but unwieldy Russian army.
War of Attrition and Parleys
To break the deadlock, Moscow could try to open new fronts, warns Oleksiy Danylovwhich heads the Defense and National Security Council of Ukraine (RNBO), which ensures that “Russia is preparing to launch a landing operation in Odessa and its region.”
The Russian forces are indeed seeking to unblock the situation, which is costing them more and more in terms of men and equipment. Ramzan Kadyrov, loyal to Vladimir Putin who leads Chechnya, has just announced the dispatch of “1 000 additional ‘Kadyrovtsys’ in Ukraine, under the command of a certain Alaoudinov”, reports daily online Oukraïnska Pravda. However, it seems that the Chechen fighters are not working miracles on the spot, indicates the news site Novynarniawhich describes how, according to communications from Russian forces intercepted by Ukrainian special services near Mariupol, “enemy losses would be enormous”.
Knowing that Washington has just decided to deliver 100 Switchblade killer drones to Ukraine as part of an 800 million dollar arms program, and that these drones, recalls Ukraïnska Pravda, “are much faster than the Bayraktar TB-2 which Ukraine already successfully uses”, the situation risks becoming even more complicated on the battlefield.
Will the solution go through negotiations? This is what Mykhaïlo Podolyak, adviser to the Ukrainian presidency who is taking part in the talks with Russia, suggests in an interview granted to Polish television, quoted by Kyiv online daily.
“For now, he said, the Russian and Ukrainian delegations are sticking to their guns, the negotiations are tense and could take another few days to a week and a half, and during that time we should be getting closer to a peace agreement.” But, he points out, “this peace agreement must above all take into account the interests of Ukraine, which is suffering terrible losses because of the Russian invasion”.
Regarding future relations with Russia after the conclusion of a peace agreement, Podolyak comments that it will be impossible to go back in time and talk about “brother peoples”:
The bridges are cut. We will establish a strong border and treat Russia coldly, like the country that invaded our home to kill us.” – Mykhaïlo Podolyak, adviser to the Ukrainian presidency.
A monkey with a grenade
It is certain that since the beginning of the invasion, the capital of sympathy of Russia and its inhabitants is close to absolute zero in Ukraine. The country’s media are now showing no mercy with their eastern neighbors.
Thus, for this daily editorial The, “The Russian people are a zombified mass which supports its tyrant without thinking for a minute about the consequences of this insane policy”.
“’We are right because… there are more of us.’ This argument, the hordes have been using for a long time. We find it today in this war, as the Russians try to conquer the neighboring people because they are ‘outnumbered’, and therefore have much more not only zombified mass, but also murderous steel . This is their atrocious, iniquitous, anti-Christian, anti-moral logic.”
“75% of the population of the Russian Federation only get information from their own ‘zombie box’ [la télévision]. And almost as many support the war against Ukraine,” adds the editorial.
A reality which, for the blogger, social activist and entrepreneur Valeriy Pekar, is easily explained. From the pages of the Lviv daily Vissoki Zamokhe writes :
If, instead of evoking the future, we constantly feed the population with blows from this ‘great past’ to which we must return, if we put in place more and more political, economic, cultural and archaic nuns, one should not be surprised that people turn into savages, into animals.”
From “savages” “for whom the management of a modern army is a rather complex affair”, but who, on the other hand, “are able to kill women, children, because for that, rudimentary thoughts are enough”. They are like “a monkey with a grenade. Pure and simple a monkey with a grenade. To make this monkey a human being, it takes generations. To turn a human being into a monkey, as we can see, all you need is a grenade. It is therefore essential to deprive it of it, from the start”.