When Russia launched its latest massive attack on Ukraine, killing 28 civilians, including three children, it was inadvertently sending a message to the world that its ongoing war against Ukraine was an extension of other wars that it has wedged against its neighbours for as long as it has existed.
In most of its wars, Russia has sought to exterminate other people it has viewed as lesser persons living in territories considered by the Kremlin to be traditionally Russian. In these places, children have been counted among its casualties.
Last week, the region of Kharkiv and its city begun a one-week exercise commemorating the loss of 106 children killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion in that region alone. Authorities set up a memorial in the form of a granite monument displaying toys with the names of children killed by Russia’s arsenal. The monument, dedicated to fallen children, stands at the city centre.
“The youngest child killed by Russia since the war begun was two months old while the oldest was 17,” Kharkiv Governor Oleh Syniehubov said on World Children’s Day last Thursday.
Syniehubov said the teenager was Karyna Bakhur, a kickboxing and Cossack duel champion in Ukraine and Europe.
The killing of civilians, including children, has been viewed as thoroughly unconventional, falling way outside the principles of the Vienna Convention whose very foundation is to protect civilians during war.
The more Russia kills civilians in Ukraine, the more it reinforces the belief among Ukrainians that its agenda is based on a warped ideology whose intention is to remove non-ethnic Russians from the larger Slavic region of Eastern Europe.
Oleksandr Bevz, an advisor of the President of Ukraine, said at the Crimea Platform sitting on Sunday evening that Russia’s war against Ukraine was an ideological one.
“The nature of this war is colonial. It is an ideological war pushed by a denial of the existence of other people.”
Bevz said the war has been running well beyond the claim of resources.
“For more than one thousand days, Russian forces have only managed to capture one per cent of Ukraine’s territory. Had the war been over resources, that would not be the case today.”
In the latest attack, the messiah of death from Moscow flew into western Ukraine accompanied by 476 drones and 48 missiles, which included cruise missiles and seven Kalibr cruise, according to Ukraine’s air force. It left blood in its trail in the regions of Ternopil and Lviv, which harbours Ukraine’s third largest city. Other regions affected were Khmelnytskyi and Ivano-Frankivsk.
Ukrainian air defenses intercepted 442 drones, 34 Kh-101 cruise missiles, and seven Kalibr cruise missiles. Meanwhile, seven missiles and 34 drones struck 14 locations, while debris from downed drones and missiles fell on six additional sites said the Air Force.
The Russian attack on Ternopil killed at least 28 people, including three children, and injured 93 others, among them 18 children, according to Ukrainian emergency services.
The fresh attack on Lviv is similar to the March 2022 attacks on Taras Schevchenkos statues in the outskirts of Kyiv, which was interpreted by Ukrainians as a mission to silence the Ukrainian spirit of resilience borne from its poetic dad and philosopher, Taras.
The man, who today to Ukraine is the equivalent William Shakespeare and John Locke in one, went beyond what Shakespeare did in England by becoming a lone voice at a time no soul would raise their voice against the ruling Tsars. He used his plays and the painting brush to educate the people of Ukraine to seek freedom and independence from Moscow. He suffered the consequences but his teachings created Ukraine in 1991 upon the fall of the ‘iron curtain’.
To destroy Lviv is to destroy a section of the Ukrainian spirit. That is why, of the cities that have been hit most save for Kharkiv and Kyiv, Lviv has together with the other two unconquered cities, bore scars given by the death messiah of Moscow.
Lyviv is a symbol of Ukraine’s journey. It is the country’s cultural city whose architecture speaks of traditional European ways. When you walk in some sections of the city, especially what is called the old town and Jewish settlement, you seem to see yourself in the past because of the medieval architecture, fully preserved.
“Lviv looks much different from other Ukrainian cities,” says Kyiv city tour guide Eugene Kudriashow.
“It feels like an old Europe. It is full of baroque architecture, and also the secession style. Moreover, the whole historical centre of Lviv is under UNESCO protection.”
The western region, where Lviv is capital, is also home to millions of haters of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Lviv has contributed thousands of its sons to fight Vladimir’s forces and today holds some of the most illustrious memorials in Ukraine.
Russian leader Putin has summed up his mission in Ukraine rather condescendingly. A foxy smile playing on his lips during several sittings with different development partners in Moscow and during a television interview last year with American Broadcaster Tucker Curlson, Putin said his ongoing war against the country is an operation and not a war.
BBC reported that Putin considers modern-day Ukraine occupies historically Russian lands and is an “anti-Russia project” created by external forces supported by Western nations since the seventeenth century.
Kyiv considers Putin a war criminal, placing him in the same league as Adolf Hitler and supports the decision of the International Criminal Court listing him among five subordinates now facing charges before the ICC.
Ukraine’s office of the Prosecutor General said at the Crimea Platform session that Ukraine is fully working with the ICC. Cooperation with the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, said Denys Lysenko, the deputy departmental head at the prosecutor’s office, was strengthened by the opening of the ICC “field office” in Kyiv on September 14, 2023, the largest outside The Hague.
Following the cooperation on March 17, 2023, the pre-trial chamber of ICC issued arrest warrants for President Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, in connection with the deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories to the Russian Federation.
On March 5, 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for the long-range aviation commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces Sergei Kobylash and the former commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Viktor Sokolov (dismissed in February 2024), over the shelling of Ukrainian critical infrastructure.
On June 25, 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for former Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov over the shelling of Ukrainian critical infrastructure.
Putin’s own understanding of his war against Ukraine is laced with nuances of history, where he celebrates the days of the Russian empire under the imperial Tsars. That is why, at the core of his justification for invading Ukraine, is his claim that it stands on lands that are historically Russian.
Whether known to him or not, from the bygone days of Russian warrior regimes run by sword-wielding Tsars in the medieval times through to the renaissance period that ushered in the tumultuous 18th century where it survived Napoleone’s aggression, Russia has forever sent a message to the world: whether in its eyes the world begun and ended in the imagination of the tsars or it was indeed geographically real, has mattered little. Russia has killed and walked on anyone objecting to its expansionist heart.
Tales abound from several republics within the Russian Federation harbouring pressure groups complaining about Moscow’s sneer against them. From Buryatia to Ingushetia and the Caucasus republics north of the Black Sea, none wants to be part of the Federation.
Historians who have researched the Black Sea basin have recorded events of the North Caucasus and Southern Caucasus, which today lie in the Russian Federation, revealing brutal campaigns by Tsarist Russia annihilating civilians.
In May, Human Rights Watch and the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine reported deliberate killing of civilians, which pointed to a Russian war character that goes back to the 18-19 centuries Russo-Circassian 100-year campaign that exterminated what the Kremlin derogatively described as “rebellious mountain dwellers”, the Circassian people.
Bezhan Kharova’s work, The Circassians, in its final section, reads:
“During the Russian-Circassian war, the Russian empire forcefully expelled populations residing in the Western and Central parts of the North Caucasus-Abaza. During the war, the Russian authorities were executing the ethnic cleansing of populations. They were deliberately creating such conditions, which aimed at full or partial physical annihilation of the population.”
Today, Putin is making orders that carry a scaringly similar tinge, to pull away ancestral Ukrainian territory in the Donbass region.
