Putin Ups Ukraine Civilian Attacks as Russian Losses Mount
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Kyiv Metro, the subterranean mass-transit system in Ukraine’s capital city, reported a record 52,500 people sought safety and shelter Thursday in its underground railway stations.
Nearly 4,500 were children.
Images and videos showed people tightly clustered together. Some brought sleeping bags, others camping tents, and multiple cat carriers could be seen as well.
Many of the photographs and videos captured men, women, and children peering at their smartphones.
Above ground, hundreds of Russian ballistic missiles and drones rained down on Kyiv in wave after wave. Thus far, 27 people have died, and more than 100 civilians were injured.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned of the impending Russian attack earlier in the day at a press conference in Dublin with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin. “Today I ask our people in Ukraine to be especially careful to protect themselves, their families, their children, to be sure to use shelters and to heed air raid alert signals across Ukraine,” he said.
Mr. Zelensky was visiting the Irish capital to pay tribute to Ireland’s assumption of the rotating European Union presidency for the next six months. The Ukrainian president was also in Dublin to diplomatically push for Ukraine’s accession to the EU.
Instead, given the gravity of the intel Ukraine’s military intelligence collected, he immediately returned home.
In the balance: Kyiv woke up again to a battered and bruised city. One massive apartment building appeared to have been hit on its top floors and was ablaze. Another apartment complex was half-collapsed into rubble as if an earthquake had hit the city.
Militarily speaking, the damage was insignificant from a warfighting standpoint. Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose armies are stagnated on the frontlines in occupied Ukraine, keeps electing to target Ukrainian civilians to achieve what his army cannot on the battlefields.
Terrorizing men, women, and children, in many ways, is the only weapon Mr. Putin has left. He truly is a drowning man, and he is willing to kill anyone around him — including kids — to try to save his failing war and by extension his evil regime.
It is their lives, especially the kids’, that are in the balance and being threatened daily by Mr. Putin.
Mr. Zelensky gets it. After Thursday’s Russian attacks subsided, he said, “Putin is losing this war. That’s what’s happening. He understands that the only thing he can do is intimidate people and simply kill civilians with missile strikes.”
The Kremlin, of course, denied this. Dmitry Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, insolently claimed Moscow only targeted “military or quasi-military targets.”
Really?
Ukraine is not fighting Russia using apartment blocks and civilians as human shields. The kinetic fight is underway on the frontlines in the Donbas and in and around Crimea.
Decision point: Brussels is very good, indeed too good, at scheduling meetings to discuss scheduling new meetings to talk about how to protect Ukrainian civilians from Mr. Putin’s war crimes and ongoing crimes against humanity.
But talk, as the cliché goes, is cheap. It is also deadly. Since the start of the Kremlin’s “special military operation” through May 31, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has verified 62,716 Ukrainian civilian casualties; 16,126 were murdered by Mr. Putin’s army. In May alone, 274 people were killed and another 1,763 injured.
We have long called for a no-fly zone in western Ukraine. It has been more than a year since Ukrainian and British air-force experts proposed Sky Shield. Notably, it was strongly endorsed by retired General Philip Breedlove, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe.
It is time to get it done.
How many more Ukrainian civilians must die before Europe — and ideally the United States too — acts? Mr. Putin is not going to stop, especially as his war in Ukraine sinks deeper and deeper into the abyss.
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