The regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin is openly admitting to a deliberate course of systematic murder, targeting Ukrainian civilians with drones, bombs and missiles. Small drones now zero in and drop grenades.
“The West is faced with a choice,” Sergei Shoigu, secretary of Putin’s Security Council and former defense minister, said Nov. 7. He threatened “the destruction of the Ukrainian population” if Washington does not force Kyiv to the negotiating table.
The Kremlin hopes Washington will roll back its sanctions and pressure Kyiv to agree to peace terms favorable to Moscow under newly elected President Donald Trump. Russian forces occupy almost a fifth of Ukrainian territory.
Shoigu declared that the “collective West is losing its economic, political and moral leadership.”
From its first days, Moscow’s invasion has targeted working people who came forward as the heart of the fight to resist Putin’s assault on their country’s national sovereignty. And they remain defiant and determined in the face of the Kremlin’s attempts to terrorize them today.
The once occupied city of Kherson in Ukraine’s south is a special target for Russian drone operators just across the Dnipro River. They are brash enough to put up online videos of their murderous attacks.
Civilians out in the open, in cars or on buses are hunted by operators using small China-made drones fitted with videocams to locate and track workers and drop small explosives and mines on them. There are now dozens of attacks each day, too numerous and flying too low to be stopped by normal air defenses.
Serhiy Dobrovolsky was killed by a grenade dropped on him in his backyard. He was among 50 civilians killed in over 7,000 drone attacks in Kherson since July. More than 600 were injured, including several children.
“They can see who they are killing,” Angela Dobrovolsky, Serhiy’s wife, told BBC News. “Is this how they want to fight, by just bombing people walking in the streets?”
Olha Chernishova was carrying her groceries home from her car when she heard the telltale whirring of a drone overhead. She ran for her house and was showered with broken glass when a grenade dropped by the drone operator hit her car.
“This is a systematic, well-planned operation to destroy civilian life in Kherson,” Serhii Kuzan, a military adviser, told the Guardian. Its goal “isn’t to win on the battlefield, it is to destroy the civilian population so the central government will negotiate or surrender.”
Tenfold increase in drone attacks
The number of long-range drone strikes is now 10 times those of last year. Swarms of delta-winged kamikaze drones constantly appear over residential neighborhoods, including near nightly attacks aimed at Kyiv, the capital.
In October, the Ukrainian military tracked a record 2,023 unmanned aircraft targeting civilian and military targets.
The port city of Odesa that month was hit by missiles every second day, with more than a dozen people killed. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, about 380 buildings were damaged in October. Nine people were killed and over 40 injured in scores of air and artillery strikes on Zaporizhzhia Nov. 7.
Moscow’s airstrikes now target supermarkets to deny civilians food and other necessities.
Putin’s bombardment has a precedent in the deliberate targeting of civilian populations by allied forces during World War II. The U.S. and U.K. firebombed workers’ neighborhoods in cities like Dresden and Hamburg in Germany, killing tens of thousands. The U.S. Air Force did the same to Tokyo, and dropped even more deadly atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
US pressure on Ukraine sovereignty
The ruling capitalist families and their government in the U.S. are motivated solely by their own economic and political concerns. Washington consistently defends its imperialist interests, not the restoration of Ukraine’s sovereign borders.
The U.S. rulers adjust their largely bipartisan course by making use of alternating administrations of Democrats or Republicans.
Washington and its allies have provided a flow of arms to help Kyiv avoid defeat, but not enough to decisively repulse the invasion.
The Joseph Biden administration has carried out a policy of verbal support for Ukraine while providing far less weaponry than they need. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the media Oct. 30 that only 10% of U.S. military assistance promised by Biden this year has actually arrived.
Under these circumstances, Ukraine’s outgunned and stretched defenses are under constant pressure on the eastern front. Moscow has made gains on the battlefield there in recent months, but at a staggering cost. Putin’s military commanders advance by use of “meat wave” assaults, which means extremely heavy casualties. Almost 60,000 Russian soldiers are estimated to have died this year alone.
The disdain Putin shows for Russian workers in uniform is fueling mounting opposition to his war among soldiers and their families, and other working people in Russia. They are key allies of the Ukrainian toilers and their determination to defend their national sovereignty.