A thousand days under hell and the ambition of the dictator Putin
The war that began with the invasion of Russian troops on 24 February 2022 shows no signs of ending soon. Indeed, the Kremlin has recently ordered an intensification of shelling of Kiev and other Ukrainian cities.
The war, which has gone through several phases, is now in its third year and Europeans have grown accustomed to the fact that drone and missile attacks in the backyard of Eastern Europe are leaving people dead and wounded every day.
In the first weeks of the invasion, the fear within the European Union (EU) was that Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Later, those concerns dissipated, and in recent weeks there has been renewed concern that the course of the attacks will draw Europeans into the war.
President Joe Biden's authorisation for the Ukrainian military to use ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) long-range missiles to bomb the Russians inside the Russian Federation has been interpreted by the Kremlin as an escalation of the conflict.
This tactical, surface-to-surface missile system, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, has a range of 300 kilometres; it is powered by a single-stage solid propellant rocket, is 4 metres long and 610 millimetres in diameter.
The first use of ATACMS was during Operation Desert Storm, when the US launched thirty-two missiles into Iraqi territory. Each missile is priced at 1.5 million dollars.
Ukraine is not only using ATACMS, but the UK has also given the green light to use its Storm Shadow missiles, a weapon manufactured by the MBDA company. These missiles have a range of 560 kilometres and cost 3.2 million dollars each.
‘Moscow will consider the launch of long-range missiles guided by US military experts as a new qualitative phase of the war,’ Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said while attending the G20 in Rio de Janeiro.
In the death throes of his administration, Biden has stepped forward and granted the Kiev government the delivery of thousands of anti-personnel mines to reinforce defensive lines on its territory at a key moment for the Russian military as it continues to make gains inside the Donetsk region.
In the early weeks of the war, the White House provided Kiev with anti-tank mines to destroy Russian armoured vehicles but refused to deliver landmines. Now that position is changing.
With the Democrats having lost the election and the virtual Republican president, Donald Trump, promising to end the war in Ukraine with a unilateral peace plan that would be contrary to Ukrainian interests, the Biden administration is making a series of military concessions to the Ukrainian leader, Volodymir Zelensky. The Kremlin indicates that the US is crossing a number of red lines.
The first ATACMS shelling used by the Ukrainian military targeted the Russian town of Bryansk, a city 380 kilometres southwest of Moscow and 100 kilometres from the Ukrainian border.
The attack was confirmed by the Russian defence ministry, which said in a statement that there were no civilian casualties and that the Ukrainian-launched missile battery was aimed at an ammunition depot. ‘There were six ballistic missiles, five of which were shot down or destroyed, and their fragments caused a fire at a military facility’.
The Kremlin, in the wake of this attack, believes that the US intends to escalate the tension of the war and take it to another level in which the West will end up involved.
The Ukrainian army has also launched Storm Shadow missiles against the Russian region of Kursk, which borders Ukraine, without confirming civilian casualties or specifying how many missiles were launched.
In response to the supply of these missiles by the US and UK, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin approved a series of changes to the nuclear doctrine that establishes ‘new circumstances’ under which the Kremlin would consider using its nuclear arsenal.
‘The new doctrine states that an attack with conventional missiles, drones or aircraft by a non-nuclear-weapon state supported by a nuclear-armed state would be considered by Moscow as a joint attack against Russia or Belarus. In the face of a critical threat, the response would be nuclear', according to these amendments.
This is not the first time that Putin or his closest team, such as Lavrov himself or his spokesman Dmitry Peskov, have threatened to use part of their nuclear arsenal.
NATO has also come to consider such a Russian response. What nuclear strategy might Putin pursue? There are two ways: 1) Tactical nuclear weapons with small nuclear warheads with a delivery system intended for a limited strike; these could be one-kiloton loads (a thousand tonnes of TNT explosive). A 15-kiloton bomb was dropped on Hiroshima with a powerful blast radius that left more than 200,000 dead on impact, but thousands of victims in the years that followed; and 2) strategic nuclear weapons that are long-range with powerful payloads on intercontinental ballistic missiles.
A destroyed country
A thousand days have passed since the invasion and the humanitarian catastrophe. The UN Regional Information Centre for Western Europe reports that 6,168,000 Ukrainian refugees are in various European countries, according to statistics from last July.
Another 571,000 Ukrainians are in exile outside Europe, bringing the overall total of this community to 6.74 million people who have fled their homes due to the Russian invasion. Inside Ukrainian territory, there are 3.7 million people who have moved from the overrun regions that are the focus of most of the fighting to other areas of their country that they consider safer.
Ukraine had a population of 43.5 million in 2021 and is now down to 37.9 million. Many are in exile, but there are also civilian casualties and thousands of military deaths in combat.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR), the conflict has claimed the lives of 11,662 civilians between 24 February 2022 and mid-August 2024. Among the victims are 639 children; in addition, 24,207 civilians have been wounded, including 1,577 children.
President Zelenski continues to call on international bodies, such as the UN, to demand that Moscow return 200,000 minors that Russia has allegedly illegally transferred to its territory. The UNHCR also confirms that at least 1.3 million Ukrainians are in Russia, and their legal, economic and human situation is unknown.
‘Moreover, the war has devastated the Ukrainian economy, reversing the development gains made in recent years and plunging almost 25 per cent of the population into poverty,’ according to the latest UN Annual Report.
As far as military casualties are concerned, President Zelenski is very zealous in releasing the true number of combat deaths as a strategy to avoid undermining soldiers' morale. The figures provided by the Kiev government speak of between 31,000 and 35,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed in combat since the beginning of the war.
‘Not 300,000, not 150,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed in combat, not whatever Putin and his lying circle say. But each of these losses is a great loss for us,’ Zelenski refuted.
Last August, the Pentagon addressed the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed in the nearly three-year invasion, estimating casualties of 70,000 soldiers and up to 120,000 wounded.
Downing Street, for its part, estimates the number of Russian soldiers killed and wounded at 350,000, a figure that the Kremlin also denies, pointing out that Ukrainian casualties are much higher.
Europe fears being dragged into the war
The course of the war in Ukraine remains uncertain and there are fears in Europe that in the coming weeks, before Trump takes office in the White House, the fighting will intensify and the scenario will rapidly worsen.
Trump says the first thing he will do is to pacify the region, but that will only be achieved if Putin stops attacking Ukraine and withdraws his troops from the invaded territories. That is what Zelenski wants, but it is not what Putin wants and Trump has never said that he will ask Putin to return the invaded territories. It is a complicated conundrum.
In the European Union (EU) they also expect Trump to step back from NATO, which would leave European allies without the protective umbrella of the US military.
French President Emmanuel Macron himself has been insisting that Europeans will have to defend themselves and that there will come a point when they will not be able to let Ukraine fall into Putin's hands.
At the end of February, Macron said he will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win the war and went so far as to say that neither France nor the EU could rule out sending troops to Ukraine.
‘At the moment there is no consensus to officially send troops on the ground. But in terms of options, nothing can be ruled out because Russia cannot take over Ukraine, for us it is a threat,’ he said at the time.
A Foreing Affairs article by Alex Crowther, Jahara Matisek and Phillips P. O'Brien discusses how ‘the taboo’ in Europe of entering (again) into a military conflict has been broken.
‘On 26 February, French President Emmanuel Macron said that the deployment of European forces in Ukraine could not be ruled out. Since then, other European officials have joined in: the Finnish defence minister and the Polish foreign minister have suggested that their countries' forces could end up deployed in Ukraine. These comments, combined with existing support for such measures in the Baltic states, show that there is a growing bloc of countries open to sending their soldiers to help Ukraine,’ according to the publication.
It speaks, above all, of European troops, not NATO troops (although thirty European countries are members of the Transatlantic Alliance) because it rules out any US involvement under the Trump administration.
Kiev's allegation of North Korean soldiers fighting in Russian ranks is also another significant warning that only speaks of a war that will escalate.
In this regard, Reuters reveals that in recent days, a contingent of 10,900 North Korean soldiers has been deployed in Kursk. Since last August, a group of Ukrainian soldiers invaded Russia with the aim of seizing several locations, including Kursk.
Kiev's strategy is to attack several Russian cities near its border, such as Bryansk, Kursk and Belgorod. South Korea's National Intelligence Service claims that North Korea, in addition to supplying Putin with soldiers willing to die for the Russian cause, is also supplying Russia with self-propelled howitzers and multiple rocket launchers.
Against this backdrop, leaving Ukraine without military and financial assistance is unacceptable to the EU. The President of the European Commission herself, Ursula von der Leyen, in a video uploaded to her X account reiterated that the EU will never leave Ukraine alone in Putin's hands.