In the meantime, the Russian troops are said to have succeeded in taking the first parts of the city. Mariupol is the last Ukrainian bastion between the separatist regions of Donetsk and Lugansk and Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014.
- The Great Fear in Odessa
The army, which Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin sent on the march, is now apparently also targeting the Black Sea port of Odessa. The fierce fighting in the Mikolayiv region is a strong indication of this. The governor there, Vitali Kim, wrote: “The occupiers shelled hospitals and boarding schools at night with indiscriminate, chaotic fire.” If the region falls, the road to Odessa would be clear. And if the port city also fell to the Russians, Ukraine would be cut off from access to the sea.
The separatists, who split off in 2014, also created facts in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions together with their Russian brothers-in-arms: In the Lugansk Oblast, the joint military units already control 70 percent of the territory. For comparison: Before the Russian invasion on February 24 this year, Ukrainian forces controlled 70 percent of the territory.
Putin is also bombing targets in western Ukraine more and more frequently. According to information from Kiev, Lutsk and Ivano-Frankivsk in particular were targeted by Russian long-range Tu-95 bombers. In Lviv, formerly Lemberg, there are repeated air raid alarms, but the historically unique city has not yet been attacked.
According to Western military experts, despite the superiority of the Russian armed forces, they have not achieved the territorial gains that they wanted. On the contrary: According to (unverifiable) information from Zelensky, the Russian army has suffered the heaviest losses in decades. Accordingly, 360 Russian tanks and 1,200 armored vehicles were destroyed, as well as around 60 combat aircraft and 80 helicopters. 12,000 Russian soldiers were killed and 1,300 Ukrainians were killed.