As Moscow’s cruelty pours down on Ukraine, the country faces its ‘to be or not to be’ moment

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/03/2022 (1025 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Snow falls. Bombs fall. Food is scarce. No running water, no heat, no electricity, no shelter from the ravages of war.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands must answer the question that is both existential and brutally present: Do I stay or do I go?

In the besieged eastern Ukrainian city of Sumy on Tuesday, buses and cars massed to evacuate civilians even as authorities in Kyiv accused Moscow of shelling a similar refugee corridor arranged for residents to escape the devastated city of Mariupol on the north coast of the Sea of Azov. According to Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, 5,000 people — including 1,700 foreign students — had joined the abandonment of Sumy in the hours that egress was operational.

On the previous night, an airstrike against Sumy had claimed 21 lives, including two youngsters. “The bodies of 21 people, including two children” were found in the rubble aftermath from the attack, the regional public prosecutor stated on Facebook.

“The enemy has launched an attack heading exactly at the humanitarian corridor,” the Ukrainian Defence Ministry said on Facebook, adding that the Russian army “did not let children, women and elderly people leave the city.”

Sumy is just 50 kilometres from the Russian border.

In encircled Mariupol, an estimated exodus of 200,000 people — nearly half the port city’s population — were hoping to flee, with hospitals facing severe shortages of antibiotics and painkillers, and doctors performing emergency procedures without them. Red Cross officials were waiting to hear when a reliable humanitarian corridor would be established.

Evacuation corridors from Mariupol had failed during scheduled operations Saturday and Sunday when Russian troops violated announced temporary ceasefires.

Vadym Bochencko, mayor of Mariupol, on Tuesday said the body of a six-year-old girl, Tanya, who died from dehydration had been pulled from the rubble of a destroyed apartment building. “Her mother was killed. We can’t imagine how much suffering she had to bear. In the last minutes of her life, she was alone, weak, frightened, thirsty.”

As has become manifestly obvious, Russian troops and the generals who command them can’t be trusted. Consideration for civilians just isn’t in their command-and-control DNA. Five alleged corridors promised by Russians in recent days have either been determined to be too perilous or designed to dump refugees in Belarus — from which the invasion was launched — and Russia, which is utterly unacceptable.

“We have information that the Russian side has planned to disrupt the corridors,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minster Iryna Vereshchuk said in a letter sent to the International Committee of the Red Cross. “Manipulations are being prepared to force people to take another route, which is not co-ordinated and dangerous.”

Dominik Stillhart, director of operations for the ICRC, told BBC Radio that a team on the ground had discovered the road out of Mariupol, before it reached the first checkpoint, was mined.

Even as sappers cleared mines, shelling came closer toward the “green corridor.”

“Such actions of Russians are nothing but genocide of the people of Ukraine,” proclaimed the nation’s Defence Ministry. “The crimes of the Kremlin occupiers will not go unpunished!”

In Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city, merciless bombardment continued Tuesday, with shells slamming into apartment buildings. “I think it struck the fourth floor under us,” Dmitry Sedorenko told the Times of Israel from his hospital bed. “Immediately, everything started burning and falling apart.” When the floor collapsed beneath him, Sedorenko crawled through the third storey, past the bodies of his neighbours.

From the city of Izium, in the pummelled region of Kharkiv, deputy mayor Volodymyr Matsokin sent out an SOS after a hospital was blasted by rockets, calling it “the next circle of hell” as patients struggled from the ruins.

Thirteen days into the invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin’s only sustained strategy is the terrorizing of a defiant people, as his demoralized troops engage in looting of places they’ve occupied, commandeering civilian buildings and setting up firing positions in densely populated areas.

Military experts — they’re thick on the ground outside Ukraine, retired brass all over the news channels — can make no other sense of Russia’s offensive tactics beyond efforts to petrify, panic and break the populace’s will. That clearly hasn’t happened, despite all the blows the citizenry has absorbed.

The trajectory of Russia’s invasion has befuddled knowledgeable observers, even as troops have essentially inflicted sieges on many cities in the east, north and south, and while a host of western countries have turned up the dial on punishing economic sanctions — U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced a ban on imports of Russian oil and gas, which will send prices at the pump soaring, though polls show Americans are willing to live with this consequence. As well, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the U.K. would phase out the import of Russian oil by the end of the year. The European Union, much more dependent on Russian oil and gas, has thus far not followed suit.

U.S. defence officials have estimated that Russia, in less than a fortnight, has lost from 2,000 to 4,000 troops, and upwards of 1,000 vehicles, including 140 tanks destroyed or damaged.

Estimates offered by Ukraine’s Defence Ministry are far higher: As of Tuesday, 11,000 troops lost — more than in the two Chechen wars — and 30,000 wounded; 290 tanks disabled, 999 armoured combat vehicles, 177 artillery systems, 40 multiple rocket launcher systems, 60 fuel tanks, 46 planes and 68 helicopters. Those figures can’t be independently verified.

The ministry’s intelligence arm claimed as well Tuesday that a key Russian general and military hero, Vitaly Gerasimov — chief of staff of the 41st Army — had been killed in fighting outside Kharkiv, along with other senior officers, an announcement confirmed by investigative journalism agency Bellingcat. Gerasimov won medals for his performance in the second Chechen war, the Russian military operation in Syria and the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

The ministry also broadcast what it claimed was a conversation between two Russian Federal Security Service officers — the FSB, Russia’s principle security agency — discussing Gerasimov’s death and complaining that their secure communications were no longer functioning inside Ukraine.

If the reports of Gerasimov’s death are true, he would be the second Russian general killed since the invasion began. At the beginning of the month, Russian media confirmed that Maj.-Gen. Andrei Sukhovetsky, deputy commander of the 41st Army, had been killed.

To this date, Ukraine has received 17,000 anti-tank missiles and 3,700 anti-aircraft missiles from NATO donor countries.

But more, more, desperately more lethal munitions are needed for Ukraine to even hold Russia at bay, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues to plead — even with a no-fly zone off the table.

In an unprecedented and emotional speech broadcast live to the House of Commons on Tuesday, Zelenskyy channelled Winston Churchill when he told the packed chamber: “We will continue fighting for our land, whatever the cost. We will fight in the forest, the fields, the shores and in the streets.”

Unshaven, dressed in a dark T-shirt, sitting next to a Ukrainian flag, Zelenskyy cited Shakespeare to describe the plight of his nation.

“The question for us now is to be or not to be,” as per a translation of the speech, which was broadcast live from Kyiv. “Oh no, this Shakespearean question. For 13 days this question could have been asked, but now I can give you a definitive answer. It’s definitely yes, to be.

“And I would like to remind you the words that the United Kingdom has already heard, which are important again. We will not give up and we will not lose.”

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno