A Week Into Ukraine War, Russians Capture Kherson

A week after the start of Moscow’s war on Ukraine, Russia today declared that it captured the city of Kherson, situated just north of the strategic Crimean peninsula. Russian paratroopers played a key role in that assault, while back on the ground in the center of the country a 40-mile-long Russian military convoy closed in on the capital, Kiev. In another sign of Moscow’s newfound appetite for striking civilian targets — a toxic pivot made painfully clear when lethal missile strikes on Kiev damaged the Babi Yar Holocaust memorial site yesterday — the Guardian reports that early-morning missile strikes hit a police building and a university in the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv. A tweet from the Ukrainian emergency services agency showed a blast site and a badly damaged building on fire. The hostilities come a day after a speech by President Zelensky urging more Western action brought members of the European Parliament to their feet and after President Biden, delivering his first State of the Union address, denounced a “menacing” Vladimir Putin and vowed that “freedom will triumph over tyranny.” Britain’s Independent and other press outlets reported that Ukraine says its forces foiled an assassination plot against Mr. Zelensky, with officials claiming that the unit of elite Chechen forces, called Kadyrovites, behind it was “eliminated.” The news doesn’t necessarily augur carefree strolls in Kiev for Mr. Zelensky, however; earlier in the week the Times of London reported that some 400 members of a private militia run by an ally of President Putin, Dmitry Utkin, have likely already been in the country for weeks, the mercenaries said to have been flown in from Africa with a mission to take out the top leadership.Worth noting then, as the Ukrainian president becomes a social media star brighter than any Kardashian could ever dream of, is a piece in the Atlantic about “The Grim Stagecraft of Zelensky’s Selfie Videos.” The Ukrainian president’s dispatches from the streets of Kiev “have doubled as proof of life and missives of solidarity,” its author says.Global focus is on how far Russian forces will go in their bid to wrest control of Ukraine from its rightful government, and how fast. The number of Russian troops in Ukraine is “not enough to hold major cities for long,” according to an article in Al Arabiya that quotes a vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Seth Jones. “The Russian army is overextended and in a precarious position if Ukraine becomes a protracted war. Assuming 150,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine and a population of 44 million, that is a force ratio of 3.4 soldiers per 1,000 people. You can’t hold territory with those numbers,” the Dubai-based site quotes the analyst as saying. As Europe grapples with the geo-strategic implications of the war next door, there is also an escalating refugee crisis unfolding. In the past six days alone, 660,000 refugees have fled Ukraine to neighboring countries, according to the latest government data compiled by UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency. This prompts an interesting headline from Al Jazeera; “Series of refugee crises hardens EU policy, then Ukraine happens.” In recent years European countries like Greece and Italy have been on the frontlines of the refugee juggernaut triggered by turmoil in the Middle East, notably Syria, but the new headache comes from the north. For the moment it’s all about logistics: Greek newspaper Kathimerini reports that a humanitarian corridor will be opened today for the evacuation of Greek nationals from the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol. A convoy will head from Mariupol, which the newspaper notes has been “the heart of the ethnic Greek community dating back to the 18th century,” across Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhya region before crossing into Moldova. Last month Russian airstrikes in and around Mariupol killed 16 ethnic Greeks.Casualties among the militaries continue to mount. The Guardian reported yesterday that more than 70 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the eastern city of Okhtyrka after a Russian missile strike on a military base there. Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reports today that President Zelensky says that “about 6,000 Russian soldiers were killed in the first six days of the war.” How accurate that assessment is may not be immediately clear, but as the war lurches into a new month the outlook for speedy resolution looks more bleak than bright. Just how far apart the two sides are can be seen in ways big and small: Russian propaganda site Sputnik runs a headline this morning, “Finns Sign Up for Defence Prep Courses in Droves Amid Russia’s Ukraine Special Op,” and refers to “Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine aimed at protecting the republics of the Donbass region.” But Donbass is yesterday’s news: Today all eyes are on the capital, Kiev.

A Week Into Ukraine War, Russians Capture Kherson

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