It seems hard to believe, but Putin’s Russia manages, through its actions, to continue mobilizing the civilized worlds resources of indignation, which seemed to have run dry after the illegal and unjustified invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities and abuses committed by the Russian military in that country. On Monday Moscow launched dozens of missiles and Iranian-made suicide drones on the capital Kyiv and other large cities in Ukraine, killing and injuring many civilians.
Reuters news agency wrote that attacks on such a scale against the Ukrainian cities were registered only in the first days of the war. The Russians also targeted civilian infrastructure objectives, leaving parts of Ukraine without electricity, water or heating, and disrupting electricity supplies to the European Union. The attacks came three days after a powerful explosion damaged the bridge over the Kerch Strait linking Russia to occupied Crimea, an explosion which Moscow blamed on Kyiv.
President Vladimir Putin declared that the bombings were a response to what he called the terrorist attack of Ukraine and threatened, at the same time, with further such attacks. ‘I strongly condemn Russia’s horrific missile attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. The killing of innocent people must stop. We will continue to support Ukraine in its fight against the aggression of the Kremlin’, reacted the President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis. The PM Nicolae Ciucă equally condemned Russia’s massive attacks and underlined that these actions represented ‘war crimes’ that violated the UN Charter.
The European Union denounced what it called a new war crime committed by Russia, a state which, according to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, represents terror and brutality. The President of the European Council, Charles Michel, wrote on Twitter that the indiscriminate attacks on civilians are war crimes. And the American President Joe Biden denounced the attacks and promised that the United States would deliver high-performance anti-aircraft defense systems to Ukraine.
Great Britain labeled the attacks as unacceptable, and France spoke of a war crime. Russia has demonstrated, once again, that it is a terrorist state, the Ukrainian ambassador to the UN stated at the UN forum. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres described Monday’s bombings in Ukraine as a new, unacceptable escalation of the war that civilians are paying for. In another development, three of the missiles launched by the Russians also flew over the territory of the Republic of Moldova, located between Romania and Ukraine. Chişinău labelled the violation of its airspace as unacceptable and demanded an immediate end to the bombing of Ukraine. (LS)
