Ukraine clamours for more ammunition for its army

María Senovilla, a contributing journalist for Atalayar magazine and other media, analyzed on Onda Madrid's “De cara al mundo” program the situation of the Ukrainian troops who are in the front row, what the Kremlin's objectives are, the decline, in terms of popularity, of Zelensky and how the lowering of the recruitment age from 27 to 25 may affect Ukrainian families. 

Where are you, Maria? You were in Kiev last week, where are you?  

I'm still in Kiev, in the capital, following very closely those bombings, that siege that the Kremlin is carrying out against different Ukrainian cities. The problem right now is the Zelensky government with the lack of anti-aircraft defenses that cannot cope with these attacks on cities and civilian targets.  

The bombings continue, especially in Kharkiv, where the damage has been extensive, what is called, "double-tap attacks". Tell us, what is this strategy that Russia is using right now in its bombings against cities in Ukraine?  

That double-tap attack on Kharkiv was the culmination of a week of sieges, of daily bombings against the second largest city in Ukraine, which the Kremlin has already publicly announced that it is going to make uninhabitable; that if they do not take it, if it does not become a Russian city, they are going to make it uninhabitable by bombing its critical infrastructure, its electrical systems and the residential buildings where the population lives, which is what happened in that double-tap attack that took place in the early hours of Wednesday to Thursday. 

Russia launched a wave of Sahed suicide drones against a complex of flat-rise residential buildings, blocks of flats, and when rescuers, doctors and firefighters came to help the victims, the Kremlin launched a second wave of drones against the same point. Three rescuers were killed, in addition to another civilian person, there were at least a dozen injured, and the images have shocked the citizenry. You could see it, the image was on the news on all the social networks, in all the newspapers, the image of a young firefighter who was made a video was kneeling on the ground, crying broken in front of one of those buildings, because his father, 52, and who was also a firefighter, was one of those who died in the second attack.  

They worked together in the same fire station, and they both came at the same time to assist the victims after that first wave of bombing. I must remember that this tactic, that of double bombing, violates the Geneva Convention on the Lawful Uses in War, and that it is a tactic that terrorist groups such as ISIS have used on numerous occasions. This tactic consists of that, bombing from one point, and when the help to help the victims is there, civilian help, we insist, doctors, firefighters, rescuers, they launch a second attack, another suicide drone, another missile, and in this way they kill those who are going to help the victims of the first attack.   

This is not the first time Russia has put it into practice here in Ukraine, in August last year it also carried out a double-strike attack in Pokrovsk, where they bombed with a missile a hotel very frequented by the international press, by the way, and when the rescue teams came they launched a second missile, and on that occasion there were more fatalities among the rescuers. In any case, a despicable technique that the Kremlin continues to implement, because now neither international sanctions nor any other Western measures are stopping it in this type of attacks against the population and civilian targets. 

It reminds me, Maria, of the snipers in Sarajevo, when they were shooting at someone, they weren't shooting to kill, they were shooting to cause injuries and that, when other people were coming to their aid, that's when they were shooting to kill and instead of murdering one person they murdered several. It's a practice... Well, war is despicable, so human tactics to kill each other, the truth is that they are unspeakable. Regarding infrastructure, right now, Russia is attacking Ukraine's electricity system, but Ukraine is also responding by attacking refineries in Russia. 

The attack on Russian soil has been taking place, we have told, since the week before the elections in Moscow, when those battalions of Russian citizens, but fighting on the side of Kiev, entered Belgorod and Kursk, and since then these attacks have been taking place, mostly with drones, and they are being thrown both at critical infrastructure, from where they drink, for example, the refineries, where the planes that then bomb Ukraine are supplied.  

They are also shooting at military airports and heliports, where those aerial vehicles, from where they take off to attack, and they are also attacking military headquarters, both of the Army and of secret services. Even so, these are very specific attacks, which are unlikely to make this war stop, but what they are doing is straining the Kremlin's war machine a little, which is seeing the fronts multiply, and which is one of the reasons why the advance on the combat fronts of Ukraine has stopped quite a lot, because we started the month of March with an alarming advance of Russian troops, in several points, both Zaporizhia and Donetsk. 

Being in Kramatorsk, from one day to the next they arrived almost at the gates of Chassityar, from Bakhmut to Chassityar, which is the next village and it seemed that the advance towards Kramatorsk and towards Slovyansk, to complete that capture of the north of Donetsk, which is still under the Ukrainian government, was going to be unstoppable. So, together with the reinforcement of those combat fronts, and these attacks that are taking place on Russian soil are making the Kremlin troops have to divide efforts to attend to all fronts. 

Attacks that are also being carried out in Crimea, in Sevastopol, against critical infrastructure targets and also refineries, and against the Russian fleet that is anchored in that port. It is part of that strategy to which now Ukraine, with this lack of weapons, because the large US military aid packages are still blocked for the moment, has nothing to respond with in any other way, and a rather clever strategy is being made of trying to divide the Kremlin's efforts so that they do not concentrate on one point and continue advancing inside Ukrainian territory. 

The Ukrainian foreign minister asked for anti-aircraft weapons at the last NATO meeting, because it seems that some of the Patriot batteries they had have stopped working. There is a peremptory and, above all, urgent need on the part of Ukraine, let's see if that 100,000 million fund that has been raised within NATO is closed and concretized. 

It's not that they have stopped working, it's that in the case of Patriot air defense systems, they have recently lost one because it was bombed by the Russians. Ukraine is blaming this lack of defenses. 3-4 weeks ago Ukraine lost one of these Patriots in an operation because they were taken out of the cities to bring them closer to the combat front and be able from that point to bomb the planes that take off to drop the aerial bombs, those guided bombs that, for about two months, are the ones that are carrying out most of the attacks by Russia in Ukraine.  

The Ukrainians took those Patriots out of Kiev, took them to the combat front. The operation was quite successful because they managed to shoot down between 10 and 12 Russian fighter-bombers. Once it is shot down, the problem of bombing the cities is over, but along the way the Russians located one of these very expensive anti-aircraft defense systems and made a target. Right now the defense leadership of the capital has been quite touched and those Russian missiles are managing in many cases to penetrate it and reach their targets because they do not have enough anti-aircraft defenses to stop all those attacks that are also made massively against several cities so that Ukraine cannot respond to all. The last attack was the turn of the city of Dnipro. There they did go directly for thermoelectric and hydrogen power plants. Half of the city's electrical infrastructure is out of service.  

They are working piece by piece so that they do not have to make prolonged power outages. But these attacks are piling up. That is, Russia has been systematically bombing these electrical systems since the autumn of 2022 and, no matter how quickly they want to repair them, it is accumulating and more and more infrastructure is out of service. 

And the problem of mobilization. We talked about weapons systems, we talked about energy infrastructures, but Ukraine is having problems mobilizing and the government has decided to lower the recruitment age from 27 to 25.  

These are already internal problems. This Mobilization Law is very worrying. Recall that in January it was announced that Ukraine needed between 400,000 and 500,000 new recruits to continue facing the Russian invasion, which unleashed a great social unrest that is translating into a loss of popularity of the Zelensky government.  

Some steps have already been taken. That recruitment age has been lowered from 27 to 25 and the figures are being adjusted. In the last interventions that the military leadership has made, the General Staff, said that maybe half a million men was excessive, that with 350,000 rotations could already be made to give a break to those who have been fighting for more than two years.  

This Mobilization Law is currently being debated in the Rada. It is expected that next week they will publish what has been the first discussion, a first draft to see under what conditions or with what measures this mandatory mobilization could be carried out. But the government and the opposition are very reluctant to implement a mandatory mobilization because of the loss of popularity, the loss of social support so great that that would generate.  

It should be borne in mind that those who have wanted to enlist, recruit voluntarily throughout these two years, are already in the Army. And that the rest of the Ukrainian men who have not wanted to enlist to date is because they have no intention of doing so. The Ukrainian army has mobilized a million people. 

Of that million people, 300,000 are on the combat front and 700,000 are in the rear giving logistics because it takes a lot of logistics to put a soldier on the front line. What is being said now is where this Mobilization Law and these new measures to give a break to the front-line fighters could go is that, instead of recruiting so many new soldiers, those who are already in the rear are better reorganized so that there are people who can go to the combat front, who can go to the front line and those people who are in the front line can rest. Even so, it is a very big melon that has been opened in Ukraine with the issue of forced mobilization and this is generating that many men of fighting age are leaving the country illegally.  

Recently the local press published that several NGOs had been dismantled that what they were doing was that in exchange for a bribe they made papers to Ukrainian men of conscripted age as they were drivers of that NGO who were going to cross to Poland for humanitarian material. By the time these men crossed into Poland, they were no longer returning to Ukraine. Just with two NGOs that have been published in the press, which have been published thanks to a journalistic investigation, there were more than 2,000 men who had been illegally taken out of the country in recent months, to give you an idea of the dimension of the problem.