RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE
Russia to ramp up attacks on Ukraine – Putin
Ukraine's weekend attack on the Russian city of Belgorod, which has left dozens of civilians dead and injured, was an act of terrorism, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday. Kiev will not be left unpunished when it engages in such activities, he warned.
The president insisted that Moscow will not retaliate in kind with indiscriminate attacks on civilians, but will focus instead on Ukraine’s military sites.
The president made the remarks on New Year’s Day at a military hospital in Moscow, where he met Russian servicemen wounded during the ongoing military operation. One of the servicemen asked Putin about his take on the Ukrainian strike on Belgorod and Moscow’s approach to retaliation; the president squarely described it as a “terrorist act,” which was carried out using indiscriminate weaponry.
“With these weapons they struck right at the center of the city, where people were going out on New Year’s Eve. Just an attack, a targeted strike on the civilian population. Of course, this is a terrorist attack; there is no other way to describe it,” Putin said. Ukraine's efforts at terror are aimed at destabilizing Russia and “intimidating” the country’s population, he explained.
Russia will not retaliate in kind to Kiev’s actions, despite being capable of doing so, Putin stressed. “Of course, we can, we are capable of carpet-bombing Kiev and any other [Ukrainian] city,” the president noted.
Instead, Russia will continue targeting Ukrainian military assets and infrastructure, Putin said, warning that the number of such strikes is bound to grow. The Ukrainian authorities’ terrorist activities will not be left unanswered, he stressed.
Of course, not a single such crime, and this is certainly a crime against the civilian population, will be left unpunished, there can be no doubt about that.
“We are striking with high-precision weapons at the decision-making centers, at locations where military personnel and mercenaries gather, at other nodes of this kind, at military facilities, first of all. And they are quite painful, these strikes. That’s what we’ll continue to do,” Putin stated.
Belgorod, as well as other regions of southwestern Russia, have been subjected to repeated artillery, missile and drone strikes by Ukrainian forces amid the ongoing conflict. The city was subjected to the deadliest attack to date on Saturday, when it was struck with missiles fired by multiple rocket launchers.
The munitions damaged a number of public venues and residential buildings. The attack, reportedly ordered personally by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, claimed the lives of at least 24 civilians and left over 100 injured.
WESTERN PERSPECTIVE
Ukraine's Zelenskiy says Russia suffering heavy losses
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russian forces are suffering heavy losses and the notion that Moscow is winning the nearly two-year-old war is only a "feeling" not based on reality.
"Thousands, thousands of killed Russian soldiers, nobody even took them away," he told The Economist magazine in an interview published on Monday, referring to fighting around the besieged eastern town of Avdiivka which he visited last week.
He provided no evidence to back up his assertion but Western military analysts agree Russia is paying a heavy price in men and equipment for relatively minor gains in eastern and southern Ukraine.
There was no response to a request for comment from Russian officials on Zelenskiy's remarks.
Russian officials have said Western estimates of Russian death tolls are vastly exaggerated and almost always underestimate Ukrainian losses.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said last month Russia's position was improving and it would not stop what he calls the "special military operation" until its objectives, including Ukraine's "denazification, demilitarisation and its neutral status", have been achieved.
Russian officials have dismissed as a failure a Ukrainian counteroffensive launched in mid-2023 in the east and south.
Zelenskiy acknowledged that the counteroffensive backed by advanced Western weapons may not have succeeded "as the world wanted. Maybe not everything is as fast as someone imagined."
In contrast, he hailed the "huge result" of Ukrainian forces breaking through a Russian Black Sea blockade, enabling grain exports by way of a new route along its southern coast.
If Ukraine lost the war, he said, Russia would be encouraged to advance against other countries because "Putin feels weakness like an animal, because he is an animal. He senses blood, he senses his strength."
MOBILISING UKRAINE AND THE WORLD
With support for Ukraine facing obstacles in the United States and European Union, more needed to be done to persuade the world that defending Ukraine meant defending the world, Zelenskiy said.
"Maybe something is missing. Or maybe someone is missing," he told the magazine. "Someone who can talk about Ukraine as a defence of all of us."
Zelenskiy acknowledged that "mobilisation of Ukrainian society and of the world" that was so strong at the start of Russia's invasion is not there anymore.
Ukraine saw tens of thousands of men volunteer to fight in the first months of Russia's invasion, but that enthusiasm has waned 22 months later.
"That needs to change," he said. "Mobilisation is not just a matter of soldiers going to the front. It is about all of us. It is the mobilisation of all efforts. This is the only way to protect our state and de-occupy our land."
Zelenskiy has embarked on a flurry of international trips trying to shore up Western support. At home, he has repeatedly urged Ukrainians to do their duty.
"Victory is not received or granted, it is gained," Zelenskiy said in his New Year message to Ukrainians. "And to this end, today we have to live by the rule: you either work or you fight."
A draft law that proposed lowering the mobilisation age to 25 from 27 hassparked controversy.
Russia has said it is ready for peace talks if Ukraine takes account of "new realities", suggesting an acknowledgement that Russia controls about 17.5 percent of Ukrainian territory.
Zelenskiy rejected any notion that Moscow was interested in talks, pointing to its repeated waves of aerial strikes. Russia would only agree to a pause in fighting if it needed a break to replenish its army, he said.
** Russian drones hit sites linked to Ukrainian nationalists
Russian drones attacked a university and a museum linked to two of the most prominent 20th century defenders of Ukrainian national identity on Monday, leaving locals vowing to repair the damage.
The first smashed windows and much of the roof at the National Agrarian University, outside the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, where Stepan Bandera - a hero in Ukraine but a villain according to the Kremlin - studied.
It hit on what would have been Bandera's 115th birthday.
The second ravaged a nearby museum devoted to Roman Shukhevych.
Both men were key figures in nationalist resistance to Soviet rule and were associated with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) which fought Soviet forces in World War Two.
"This is the building in which Stepan Bandera attended classes. There's a memorial plaque dedicated to Bandera, and the statue too," 82-year-old Sofia Zdorovyk said as people cleared up the rubble around her.
"Everything that's been going on in our country, for so many years, do they (Russia) feel better because of it? Don't they have enough land? Natural resources? What is it that they need?"
Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi described the strike on the museum as a symbolic act. "We will restore it after our victory," he said.
Bandera was the most prominent figure in a group associated with the UPA, whose ranks swelled to 100,000 by 1944, according to historical accounts, and continued fighting Moscow's rule until the mid-1950s. Shukhevych was the UPA's supreme commander.
Moscow still invokes Bandera's name to underpin its assertions that it invaded Ukraine in February 2022 to "denazify" the country, pointing to the fact that some nationalists initially cooperated with German forces in their battle against the Russians - though they later also fought the Nazis.
"Just hearing the name Bandera scares them (the Russians). It causes rage and hatred," Vasyl Lapushniak, President of the Lviv National Agrarian University, said. "They did not scare us with this. It only united us once more and showed our strength."
The honour of "Hero of Ukraine" was bestowed on both men in the post-Soviet period. Soldiers from the UPA's ranks were declared "veterans" alongside Soviet Red Army soldiers.
The nationalist army's activity has long been clouded by allegations that it carried out massacres of tens of thousands of ethnic Poles in western Ukraine's Volyn region - part of an area that was under Polish rule between the two world wars.
Poland and Ukraine have taken measures to honour those deaths and seal a reconciliation between the two neighbours.