Mith “high-precision, long-range missiles,” the Russian Defense Ministry announced on Saturday evening, a “logistics terminal at a military airport in the southern Ukrainian port of Odessa was disabled.” Weapons arriving from the United States and European countries were stored there. Moscow has long criticized Ukraine for receiving weapons from the West; Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu recently declared that the “special military operation”, as the war is called in Russia, is dragging on.
But the pictures from Odessa following the attack didn’t show a weapons store, but a partially destroyed block of flats. “Behind my back is what the occupiers call a military object,” Gennady Trukhanov, the city’s mayor, said in a video message in front of the rubble. A three-month-old girl was among the eight dead. The attackers would “burn in hell,” Trukhanov said. The child’s father, a baker from Odessa, posted a picture of his little daughter with bottles in the arms of the smiling mother on Instagram; she was also killed, as was her grandmother. “You are in our hearts,” wrote the father.
“Stinky Dirt”
The President of Ukraine Volodymyr Selenskyj spoke at a press conference in a metro station in the capital Kyiv of the cynicism of the attackers who killed people on the eve of Orthodox Easter Sunday and said, at this point in Russian: “Smelly bastards, what else should you call them? There are no other words.” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that the sole aim of the rocket attack on Odessa was to spread “terror”.
According to Ukrainian sources, the Russians shelled Odessa with cruise missiles fired by long-range Tu-95 bombers over the Caspian Sea. The air defenses were able to shoot down two of them. The first and so far only Ukrainian regional capital that Russia was able to capture following the raid is Cherson; The attackers have so far failed in neighboring Mykolaiv and in Odessa further to the west. However, these cities would have to be taken if the goals are to be achieved that the deputy commander of the Central Military District, Major General Rustam Minnekayev, named on Friday for the “second phase” of the “special operation” that has now begun: In addition to a “land corridor” of Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and the “complete control over the Donbass” is also regarding the conquest of southern Ukraine. The Russian ambassador in Chisinau was summoned because Minnekayev also cited access to the Transnistria region that had broken away from the Republic of Moldova as an advantage.
<!–
–>
Minnekayev’s statements raise questions. They were also distributed via the state news agency TASS. But actually the major general is not in a position to formulate official goals. He also spoke at an armaments industry conference in Yekaterinburg. The official representative of the Ministry of Defense did not comment. As the President’s spokesman Wladimir Putin When asked whether the goals of the “second phase” had expanded from the previously announced “Liberation of Donbass”, Dmitry Peskov replied that they did not comment on questions related to the “special military operation”. A Telegram channel loyal to the regime insinuated that Peskov’s words were a “confirmation of plans to integrate the south of the former Ukraine into the pro-Russian space”.
Peskow is one of the actors who has been the target of so-called information attacks in a behind-the-scenes struggle for weeks. On the other side, Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov is courting Putin’s favor with promises of maximum conquests. This might also be the aim of the advance that Minnekajew now stands for. This is also supported by the fact that the major general added that Russia is now fighting “with the whole world, as it was in the Great Patriotic War, when all of Europe, the whole world was once morest us. It’s the same now, they never loved Russia.” While the Soviet Union was in fact an ally of the Western powers during World War II, it was particularly supported by the United States. Despite this, Putin constantly strives to portray his country as a fortress that has always been “besieged”.
