the times | Tuesday March 15 2022 5News
rules of international humanitarian law,
which requires combatants to
discriminate between military
objectives and civilian elements.
Attacks that cause “disproportionate”
damage to civilians are prohibited.
Has Russia used it in Ukraine?
Markiyan Lubkivsky, from the
Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, said that
attacks on Lutsk, in western Ukraine,
had included phosphorus bombs.
A senior police officer claimed that
Russian forces had used phosphorus in
the eastern region of Luhansk. Oleksi
Biloshytsky, head of police in Popasna,
60 miles west of Lugansk city, posted
on Facebook post on Saturday: “It’s
what the Nazis called a ‘flaming onion’
and that’s what the Russcists
[amalgamation of “Russians” and
“fascists”] are dropping on our towns.
Indescribable suffering and fires.”What other weapons has Russia used?
Russia has also been criticised for firing
cluster bombs and thermobaric
missiles indiscriminately at Ukrainian
targets. Cluster bomb rockets and
artillery shells open while airborne,
releasing “bomblets” that are dispersed
over a large area, hitting many targets
simultaneously. Beyond the initial
impact, many fail to explode, posing a
long-term threat of death and injury.
Thermobaric “vacuum bombs” are
devastating weapons that suck in
oxygen and can vaporise bodies.buildings in Mariupol are destroyed; right, part of a Ukrainian missile in DonetskAn aide of President Putin has admit-
ted that the Russian army has made
slower progress than expected in
Ukraine as the Kremlin warned it
would intensify efforts to seize large
cities.
Viktor Zolotov, who leads the
Russian National Guard, often referred
to as Putin’s private army, said: “Not
everything is going as fast as we would
like.”
Zolotov, who is also a member of
Russia’s National Security Council, said
the military had been unable to achieve
its aims as swiftly as Moscow had hoped
because “Nazis” in Ukraine were using
civilians as “human shields”. He gave no
evidence to support his claims. He in-
sisted, however, that Russia would
emerge victorious.
Earlier Sergei Shoigu, the defence
minister, told Putin that “everything
was going to plan” for Russia’s army.
Moscow said last week that almost 500
Russian soldiers had died since the start
of the invasion. Other estimates put the
figure as high as 11,000.
Although Zolotov, 68, is not thought
to be in Putin’s inner circle, he is one of
the most outspoken supporters of the
war in Ukraine. Shortly before Russia’s
invasion he appeared to urge Putin to
attack during a televised meeting,
saying: “We don’t have a border withTop officer admits slow advance
Tom Ball Ukraine, we have a border with Amer-
ica, because they are the masters there.”
The Kremlin said yesterday that
Russia had encircled major Ukrainian
cities and that it could now seek to take
full control of them. It also denied
claims by US officials that Russia had
asked China for military equipment.
“All the plans of the Russian leader-
ship will be achieved on time and in
full,” said Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s
spokesman. “Putin gave orders to
hold back on any immediate assault
on large cities because the civilian
losses would be large.”
Ukrainian officials have accused
Russia of deliberately targeting
homes, hospitals and other infra-
structure, an allegation that
Moscow has denied. More
than 2,100 people are
estimated to have been
killed in Mariupol, a Black
Sea port city that has been
bombarded by Russia for
more than a week.
Zolotov, who led the
presidential security
service from 2000 to 2013,
made his comments as he was
presented with a religious icon
by Patriarch Kirill, head of the
Russian Orthodox Church.
Kirill, 75, who has previously
described Putin’s rule as “a mir-
acle of God”, said that the Au-gustow mother of God icon would “in-
spire” National Guard troops involved
in the fighting in Ukraine and aid them
in their efforts to “protect the father-
land”.
The Russian National Guard, which
was formed in 2016, is a 400,000-strong
force that incorporates interior minis-
try troops, the elite Omon riot squad,
and the Sobr rapid-reaction unit. It has
been deployed to enforce Russian rule
over territory that Moscow has
seized in Ukraine.
The patriarch said in a sermon
last month that Moscow was fight-
ing “evil forces that have always
strived against the unity of
Russia” in Ukraine, suggest-
ing that the invasion
was necessary
because gay pride pa-
rades had been held
in Kyiv and other
Ukrainian cities.
Putin was a KGB
officer in the officially
atheist Soviet Union
but now professes a
deep religious faith and
has forged an alliance with
the Russian Orthodox
Church.dViktor Zolotov said that
despite the delays Russia
would emerge victoriousF
ollowing the Russian attacks
around the battle maps of
north and southeast Ukraine
is like tracing a piece of kid’s
spaghetti stretched out by
bored fingers along the edge of half a
plate. One almost contiguous line
from just outside Kyiv through
Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Donbas and
Crimea to just outside Odesa. Where’s
the strategic sense of it all?
Even as the fighting stop-starts, as
Mariupol grows deaf from the
thunder of shelling, as the mayor of
Melitopol is led off by Russian
soldiers, a bag over his head, it’s
becoming a bit clearer as to what
Vladimir Putin wants to achieve. He
is sketching out, in blood, the future
partition of Ukraine.
The key is the Dnieper river, the
1,250-mile waterway that plunges
from its source in the Russian Valdai
hills through Belarus, through the
Ukrainian capital and the industrial
hub of Dnipro before reaching the
Black Sea shipbuilding centre of
Kherson. All three cities have come
under attack. The Dnieper is the
economic heartblood of the nation,
essential in non-winter months
because Ukraine’s road system runs
east to west rather than north to
south.
It’s seen as the country’s soul. The
national poet Taras Shevchenko
demanded that he be buried on a hill
overlooking the river “so I can seePutin is sketching in blood
the partition of Ukraine
A process of coercive
diplomacy will mean
an enfeebled rump
state in the
west, writes
Roger Boyes
News
and hear it roar, roaring, carrying
thieves’ blood to the oceans”. To
Putin, though, it’s a powerful natural
firebreak between the east and west
of Ukraine, the historical divide
between the west that was controlled
by the Kingdom of Poland and the
east that was part of Muscovy.
If it’s not possible to have a loyal,
united and neutered Muscovy 2.0 in
his grip then he might have to settle
for a split nation and call it victory.
That could be where a supposedly
diplomatic process eventually leads.
First, though, he wants to strip
rump-Ukraine, a Lviv-centred state,
of all meaning, of all true
independence. That means ensuring
that it has no access to the sea. The
military campaign that stuttered its
way through Berdyansk on the Sea of
Azov to within artillery distance of
Odesa on the Black Sea really seems
to have that ambition: to enhance
Russia’s maritime capability and
impoverish Ukraine, which ships the
bulk of its exports through Odesa.
Sevastopol in Crimea, home to the
Black Sea fleet since the 18th century,
will be all but invulnerable to attack.
The declared purpose of the
“special military operation” was
“denazification and demilitarisation”.
This is turning out to be more than
the usual Putinesque mystification.
The reason that Mariupol has been
taking such a thumping is that it
provides a land corridor for the
Russian separatists of eastern Ukraine
and Crimea. It joins up the dots.
However, it is also a fighting base
for the so-called Azov battalion, a
900-strong unit that grew out of a
far-right Ukrainian group in 2014.
They are now integrated into the
Ukrainian national guard; their
extremist, white supremacist politics
is often overlooked because of their
ferocity in battle. Typically they
smear their bullets with pig fat before
shooting at the equally ruthlessChechen Muslims who are fighting
with Russian forces.
Originally the Azovs and other
similar groups such as Dnipro 1 were
funded by Ukrainian oligarchs. For
the Putin regime they are thus a
useful propaganda target, a way of
deflecting from or masking its own
war crimes under the slogan
“denazification” and tarring the
government of Volodymyr Zelensky
with the same brush. As for
“demilitarisation”, this has become
Putin’s shorthand for bomb attacks on
anything resembling an arms depot in
western Ukraine. And now too it’s an
attempt to justify attacks on
suspected Nato arms supply convoys.
Moscow’s slogans matter, then,
because they are a pointer as to when
Putin may decide to call a halt. If a
partition of Ukraine takes place, the
Russian leader will insist on the
disarming of the west to prevent it
becoming a Nato bridgehead. How
would that be enforced or monitored?
That’s only one of the many
uncertainties surrounding an
eventual transition to peace.
The biggest question, though, is the
future of Kyiv if the country is split.
One theory about the stranded
Russian column outside the capital is
that the option of not destroying the
capital is still being toyed with by the
Kremlin. There are precedents for
non-action. In 2008 Putin decided
not to take Tbilisi during his invasion
of Georgia. He could, perhaps, spare
Kyiv — close to the hearts of Slav
nationalists in his coterie — in return
for a change of the Kyiv government.
That’s what Putin would deem to be
coercive diplomacy. One thing is for
sure, the war has not yet played itself
out. The diplomatic process cannot
even begin without an end to the
Russian devastation of cities and trust
between the two peoples and two
nations has been broken for a
generation.WOLFGANG SCHWAN/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES; ALEXEI ALEXANDROV; AZOV BATTALION/AP