WESTERN PERSPECTIVE
Ukraine's capital Kyiv is under Russian missile attack, mayor says
Russia launched a missile attack on Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, early Thursday, injuring eight people and damaging residential buildings and industrial facilities, mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
It was the first large missile attack on Kyiv in recent weeks.
Klitschko said on the Telegram messaging app that air defence units were repelling the attack. He said missile debris fell in different parts of the city.
"There are already eight injured as the result of the enemy's attack," Klitschko said.
He said that debris from a downed Russian missile hit several residential buildings, industrial sites, and a kindergarten.
Emergency workers rushed to sites in different parts of the capital and were extinguishing several fires, he said.
** Russian missile attack on Ukraine's Kharkiv kills five, causes fire
A Russian missile hit an industrial area in Ukraine's northern city of Kharkiv on Wednesday, killing at least five people and injuring eight while causing a major fire in a printing house, local authorities said.
The mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, said five others were missing after the strike. In a later posting on Telegram at about 11 p.m. local time, he said Kharkiv had come under fresh shelling, with explosions in the city.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the strike underscored the lack of proper air defences in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, and elsewhere, particularly in northern regions near the Russian border.
"Kharkiv needs an adequate number of air defence systems, Sumy region needs it, Chernihiv region and all our regions suffering from Russian terror need it," Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
"Our partners have these defence systems. And our partners need to understand that air defences must protect lives."
The Kharkiv region, which borders Russia to the north and lies close to the frontline, has suffered regular drone and missile attacks during Russia's two-year-old invasion.
The X-59 missile struck the multistorey industrial building in the afternoon.
"The building houses production facilities and offices. This is an act of terrorism because it was conducted at a time when the vast majority of the people are at work," Volodymyr Tymoshko, head of the regional police, was quoted as saying on a police account on Telegram.
"In addition to the five dead, there are another five who are missing," Terekhov, the mayor, said on Telegram.
"We have identified them, but they are not among either the injured or the dead."
Terekhov said the fire, which had spread quickly, had been almost brought under control at the site.
One of the reasons for the severe fire was that a printing house was located in the building, Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Synehubov said.
A furniture and paint products factory also came under attack, Serhiy Bolvinov, the head of the investigative department of the regional police, said.
Moscow denies deliberately attacking civilians in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine which it launched in February 2022, although many have been killed in frequent Russian air strikes across the country.
RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE
Western troops in Ukraine ‘an open secret’ – Poland
The fact that Western forces are present in Ukraine is now an ‘open secret’, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has told German press agency dpa.
The statement comes less than two weeks after the minister said the deployment of NATO troops to the country was “not unthinkable,”and that he appreciates French President Emmanuel Macron for not ruling out the idea.
In an interview with dpa on Wednesday, Sikorski stated, “As your chancellor [Olaf Scholz] said, there are already some troops from big countries in Ukraine.”
Last month during a press meeting, Scholz justified his rejection of the delivery of Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine by saying that Berlin would not participate using soldiers in targeting control, either from Germany or on the ground.
“What the British and the French are doing in terms of target control and accompanying target control cannot be done in Germany,” the chancellor told journalists at the time. His words have been widely interpreted as confirming the presence of Western soldiers in Ukraine.
Asked by dpa whether Scholz’ revelation was a problem, Sikorski responded, “In Polish, we have the expression ‘tajemnica poliszynela,’ which describes a secret that everyone knows.”
Sikorski reiterated that Warsaw would not send ground troops to Ukraine, citing historical reasons. “Ukraine and Poland have been one country for 400 years. This would provide fodder for Russian propaganda. Therefore, we should be the last ones to do so,” he concluded.
The Polish diplomat, however, welcomed the French president not taking the option of sending ground troops off the table.
Macron said in late February that he “cannot exclude” the possibility of soldiers from the US-led military bloc being sent to aid Kiev. The statement sparked a wave of denials from the leaders of NATO member states, who insisted they harbor no plans to deploy combat troops to Ukraine. He doubled down this month, saying that Paris recognizes no limits or Russian “red lines” when it comes to backing Kiev. Europeans “will have to live up to history and the courage that it requires,” the French leader insisted.
In his recent address to Russia’s Federal Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented on the talk of “deploying NATO military contingents to Ukraine,” by saying that all previous attempts to conquer Russia have ended in failure, and that “now the consequences for potential invaders would be far more tragic.”
** Potential deployment of French troops to Ukraine may be of benefit to Russia — Medvedev
Eliminating French military personnel that may appear in Ukraine would be a critical but not particularly difficult mission for the Russian Armed Forces, but for Paris such a humiliating defeat of its legions would be tantamount to being guillotined, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said.
"Actually, for the success of our cause, it would be nice if the restless French dispatched a couple of regiments to ‘Banderaland.’ It would be very problematic to hide such a number of servicemen, so systematically eliminating them would not be the most difficult task, but surely the most important one. But, just think of the beneficial knock-on effect!" he wrote on his Telegram channel.
As Medvedev noted, with so many coffins to be delivered to France from a foreign country it would be impossible to hide the mass deaths of professional soldiers.
"There will be no chance of getting away with various lame excuses and speculations that mercenaries choose their own fate and that they are risking their lives at their own discretion," he warned.
The deputy head of the Russian Security Council pointed out that such military personnel would become full-fledged combatants as part of an interventionist contingent, and so their destruction would be "a priority and a matter of honor" for the Russian Armed Forces.
"As for the Gallic roosters in the French leadership, it would be tantamount to being guillotined. They would be torn to pieces both by the enraged relatives and angry members of the opposition, who have been assured all along that France is not at war with Russia. Also, it would be a good lesson for other rambunctious fools in Europe," Medvedev predicted.
He suggested that the immortal lines of 19th century classic Russian writer Alexander Pushkin will prove their timeless relevance once again:
"Then send your numbers without number,
Your maddened sons, your goaded slaves,
In Russia's plains there's room to slumber,
And well they'll know their brethren's graves!"
On French military in Ukraine
On March 19, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergey Naryshkin said that France was already preparing a military contingent to be sent to Ukraine, which would initially amount to about 2,000 soldiers. At the same time, he remarked that French military personnel have been unofficially present in Ukraine for quite a while already. Some have already been killed or wounded.
Naryshkin pointed out that France unofficially recognized the deaths of its own servicemen. The French army has not experienced such a level of losses since the Algerian War of 1954-1962. The Elysee Palace, as Naryshkin noted, also believes that the number of dead Frenchmen has exceeded a psychologically significant threshold, and now there is a question of how to bury the dead and treat the wounded in stealth so as not to spark popular protests.
Reuters/RT/Tass