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On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved what he would call a ’special military operation’ in Ukraine.
In fact, it was a straightforward invasion, one that has so far cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers in Ukraine and tens of thousands of Putin’s own soldiers, many of them conscripts.
Russia has recorded nearly 143,000 casualties since the start of the war in Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian army.
The latest update from the Kiev Defense Ministry reported on Twitter says that the number of victims of the Russian side has reached 142,860, up by 590 compared to yesterday.
Ukrainian forces are bracing for an imminent large-scale attack by Russian troops as the Kremlin seeks to regain the initiative in the war and seize the rest of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials have multiplied warnings in recent days about a coming Russian offensive, albeit with differing timelines. Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukraine’s defence minister, said on Sunday that his country expected Russia’s invading forces to launch a new offensive in the Donbas and southern areas where it currently occupies close to 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory later this month.
Ukraine has urged the West to get military hardware into the hands of its troops as quickly as possible, as Russia fired missiles toward Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities just hours after Germany and the US announced their plans to provide modern tanks to the country.
Russia launched 55 missiles at Ukraine on Thursday morning, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Telegram. Shmyhal said the salvo was aimed at the country’s “energy facilities” and some power substations had been hit.
Ukraine’s forces have said they launched a strike on a base and field hospital where Russian troops were being housed with Ukrainian sources saying on Twitter that more than 100 people had been left under the debris.
On Sunday, the Ukrainian military’s Strategic Communications Directorate (AFU Stratcom) reported that its forces had launched a strike on the building of the hospital of a former-machine building plant in the Russian-occupied town of Kadiivka, around 30 miles south of Lysychansk.