Ukraine is Reclaiming Their Land~Putin Talks Threats Like The Bully He Is
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| Originally Published on The New York Times-Nicole Tung |
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| Vadim Belikov/Associated Press |
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine is dismissing Moscow’s threats to annex territory and defend it as Russian land, pushing ahead with military operations in the northeast and south to retake areas controlled by the Russians.
The fighting continued Saturday even as Russian proxies in four Ukrainian provinces — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson — were conducting the second day of voting in what Western officials have called “sham” referendums to join Russia. Some residents have described soldiers in ski masks, carrying rifles standing nearby as they are asked to fill in ballots.
The referendums — which are expected to culminate in the annexation of an area larger than Portugal — have raised alarms in Western nations. Annexing Ukrainian territory to Russia would imply that if Ukraine continues fighting to reclaim its land, the military action would be seen by the Kremlin as an attack on the sovereignty of Russia, the nation with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has insisted the threat to defend what could be called Russian land after an annexation process “is not a bluff.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and officials in his government have said they have no intention of slowing their counteroffensives against the Russian army in the northeast and south of Ukraine — and the ongoing fighting in those regions on Saturday underscored there was action to go along with those pledges.
In Ukraine, Mr. Putin’s threat has rung hollow in part because the Ukrainian military has been striking targets in Russia and on the Crimean Peninsula — which Moscow annexed in 2014 after a referendum that was also conducted under military occupation and widely condemned as rigged — since early in the war, without any specific military retaliation in response.
As the referendums carried on, the Ukrainian army said Saturday that over the past day it had blown up tanks and artillery pieces and downed an airplane and helicopter.
On Friday and in the early hours of Saturday, the Ukrainian military destroyed eight tanks, 11 armored vehicles and six artillery systems, the military headquarters said in a statement. The Ukrainian army does not disclose its own losses, and its claims were impossible to independently verify.
The military also said it had shot down an Iranian-made armed drone known as a Mohajer-6 that is part of a fleet of Iranian drones Russia bought over the summer, according to Ukrainian and Western officials. After a flurry of such attacks by Iranian-made drones in recent days, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry on Friday said it had expelled Iran’s ambassador.
Ukrainian officials have said they have assured the United States they will not fire precision-guided munitions from the American-provided systems known as HIMARS at targets inside Russia, even as they have been dismissing the risk of provoking an escalation. Kyiv has maintained a policy of ambiguity about strikes hitting Russian territory with other weapons, such as kamikaze drones.
Analysts have drawn a distinction between long-range strikes with drones or artillery at targets in Russia and a Ukrainian military advance to reclaim territory that Russia could claim as its own.
“Putin has pushed a lot of chips onto the table here,” Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk assessment firm in Washington. If Russia annexes territory it only partially controls in the four Ukrainian provinces and Ukraine continues to advance, “we’re going to be in a whole new world,” Mr. Kupchan said.
He said that Mr. Putin has set up a scenario without an easy path to de-escalating. “Is he saying to the West, ‘I’m crazy, help me out,’” Mr. Kupchan said, or is the threat of an intensification of the conflict sincere.
“The Ukrainians and Americans will have to ask themselves that question,” he said. “And it’s not a great question to have to ask. This is serious.”
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With Russia laying the groundwork to formally annex areas it is occupying, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine directly asked Ukrainians to help the nation’s war effort even from within the occupied territory.
Russian-backed officials in eastern and southern Ukraine continued carrying out referendums that began on Friday and that were widely viewed as staged to establish a pretext for Moscow to incorporate those areas into the Russian Federation. That would allow the Kremlin to conscript people from the region for its war effort and frame attacks on the territory as attacks on Russia.
President Biden condemned the referendums as “a sham — a false pretext to try to annex parts of Ukraine by force in flagrant violation of international law.”
“The United States will never recognize Ukrainian territory as anything other than part of Ukraine,” he said in a statement on Friday.
Mr. Zelensky, in his nightly address on Friday, asked those living in regions under partial Russian control — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson — to avoid Russian mobilization efforts “by any means” and to try to make it to Ukraine-held lands.
If they cannot, and end up in the Russian military, Mr. Zelensky asked that they assist Ukraine’s fight from the inside.
“Sabotage any activity of the enemy, hinder any Russian operations, provide us with any important information about the occupiers — their bases, headquarters, warehouses with ammunition,” he said. “And at the first opportunity, switch to our positions. Do everything to save your life and help liberate Ukraine.”
Ukrainian partisans have played a major role in the war from behind enemy lines. They were credited with taking part in a strike on a Russian air base in Crimea, an area that has been under Moscow’s control since 2014, and attacks on Russian-appointed officials in occupied cities.
As the referendums on joining Russia began this week, partisans targeted election infrastructure, blowing up warehouses containing ballots or buildings where officials were meeting in preparation for the vote. An explosion rocked the Russian-controlled southern city of Melitopol on Friday morning before voting started.
Mr. Zelensky said in his speech that Ukraine’s stunning advance in recent weeks, which has forced a Russian retreat in the country’s northeast, was enabled by the collaboration of Ukrainians living under Russian rule there.
Praising their efforts, he said, “Please do everything to increase such help.”
After President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia announced a mobilization this week that could draft about 300,000 people into the military, Ukrainians in occupied lands expressed fears of the same fate.
Mr. Zelensky called such mobilization efforts “criminal” and called on outside governments to condemn the draft and “sham” referendums in occupied Ukraine.
The State of the War
- Raising the Stakes: Kremlin-backed officials in four partially occupied regions announced referendums on joining Russia and President Vladimir V. Putin called up roughly 300,000 reservists to join the fight in Ukraine, indicating a possible escalation of the war.
- Fleeing Russia: Since Mr. Putin’s announcement of a new troop call-up, waves of Russian men who don’t want to fight in Ukraine are heading to the borders and paying rising prices for flights out of the country.
- Ukraine’s Counteroffensive: In towns reclaimed from Russian occupation, Ukrainian officials are working to identify — and punish — those who helped the enemy. It’s dividing some communities.
- In Izium: Following Russia’s retreat, Ukrainian investigators have begun documenting the toll of Russian occupation on the northeastern city. They have already found several burial sites, including one that could hold the remains of more than 400 people.
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