2024-01-01 17:26:56
The fighting will intensify in 2024, assured Vladimir Putin this Monday, during a visit to a military hospital. The Russian leader has promised new strikes on military targets in Ukraine, in retaliation for the Ukrainian army’s unprecedented bombing of the Russian town of Belgorod over the weekend. “We will intensify the strikes, no crime against civilians will go unpunished, that is a certainty,” declared Vladimir Putin.
“We will strike with precision weapons at places of decision-making, places where soldiers and mercenaries gather, other centers of this type, military installations above all. And they are very sensitive, these strikes. This is what we will continue to do,” continued Vladimir Putin.
“Westerners” in the viewfinder
Describing the bombing of Belgorod as a “terrorist act”, which left 24 dead and more than a hundred injured on Saturday, he accused the Ukrainian forces of having struck in “the very center of the city, where people were take a walk, before New Year’s Eve.
Vladimir Putin, however, considered that “Ukraine is not an enemy” in itself and accused the West of using the Kiev authorities to “settle their own problems” with Russia. “We also want to end the conflict, and as quickly as possible, but only on our terms,” Vladimir Putin continued. “We have no desire to fight endlessly, but we are not going to abandon our positions either,” he said.
109 injured, including 70 in hospital
The Russian president also estimated that Moscow’s forces now have the “strategic initiative” on the front in Ukraine, where they have been gaining ground since the failure of the Ukrainian summer counter-offensive.
The strike on Belgorod followed a series of Russian bombings on Ukrainian cities on Friday, which left around 40 dead. On Monday, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov announced that a four-year-old girl, who was in “very serious” condition, had died from her injuries, bringing the death toll from this bombing to 25 dead. According to him, 109 people were injured, of whom 70 are still in hospital.
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