The Kiev regime has taken its own people hostage

МОСКВА, 05 марта 2022, Институт РУССТРАТ.

A week after the start of a special military operation to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, it is already safe to say that the goals of the current Kiev regime have nothing to do with establishing peace. Or, at least, with the desire to save the lives of their fellow citizens.

Two rounds of peace talks, the venue of which was Belarus, demonstrated the extreme passivity of the Ukrainian side. Although from Kiev to any point of potential negotiations there is no more than an hour by helicopter or even by car, and the Russian and Belarusian sides were ready to guarantee the absolute security of the Ukrainian side, its arrival at the negotiations took up to a day.

This can be explained by various reasons — the need to receive instructions from Washington, the inability to formulate a negotiating position, the lack of sufficient information about the situation on the fronts, etc. However, all possible reasons somehow indicate the lack of political will of the supreme Ukrainian leadership to implement any peaceful scenario.

More precisely, any technically possible peaceful scenario. The remarks voiced in Kiev that there will be peace with Russia only when Russian troops leave the Russian Crimea, and the LPR and DPR recognise themselves as Ukraine, can not be taken seriously.

More details about the nuances of the Russian-Ukrainian negotiations can be found in the special material of RUSSTRAT.

Paradoxically, the Ukrainian authorities have now essentially taken their own people hostage. There is already a clear trend: where the local government has agreed with the Z-units, life (in Melitopol) flows as usual, there is no repression against the civilian population, the level of aggression of civilians against the military is minimal, taking into account all the circumstances. At places where Ukrainian influence persists, the situation is exactly the opposite.

«Human shield»

People locked down in cities are being purposefully exposed to danger. This is especially pronounced in the cities that have become serious hotbeds of Nazism — Kharkov and Mariupol. In the second settlement, the situation is the most difficult, after the transition to Ukrainian control in 2014, the city became the base of permanent deployment of the most violent nationalist battalions «Azov», «Aidar» and others.

Representatives of nationalist groups have turned peaceful neighbourhoods into fortified areas, and civilians are strictly forbidden to leave them under threat of execution. In multi-storey buildings, some apartments are equipped for firing points, and civilian neighbours perform the function of a human shield.

In a clash with any other army in the world, such difficulties would be unnecessary. As a rule, the «NATO standards» in such cases enrol the civilian population in the category of «inevitable collateral damage», and this does not affect the nature of the storming of the city in any way. The Russian Z-units cannot allow the mass death of the civilian population, which means that serious and extremely difficult work is to be done to neutralise the Nazis without the use of heavy weapons.

According to the Russian Defence Ministry, nationalists have mined a number of objects on the territory of Mariupol, acting in an absolutely terrorist logic. In particular, we are talking about the Azov State University, as well as the mined school number 34, where 60 citizens of Ukraine are forcibly detained. The only innovation here is that so far no one has thought of taking their own fellow citizens hostage. However, not only their own.

On March 3, the Russian Defence Ministry published information that Ukrainian nationalists had banned 3,189 citizens of India from evacuating from Kharkov, up to 2,700 from Vietnam, 202 from China. From the city of Sumy — 576 citizens of India, 101 citizens of Ghana and 121 citizens of China. 9 Indonesian citizens cannot leave Chernigov.

In addition, representatives of the United Kingdom appealed to the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation with a request to evacuate ten people, its citizens: seven — from Kiev and three — from Mariupol, who cannot leave the blocked settlements.

Other manifestations of terrorist methods are expressed in the form of political assassinations of those who raise their voice against the war, call for peace, or are simply ready to work together with the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation to ensure the vital activity of cities.

On March 2, the mayor of Kremennaya, Vladimir Struk, was found dead in the Lugansk region, who had previously offered local deputies to start communication with Russia and the LPR. According to his wife, on the first of March he was kidnapped by unknown men in camouflage. Then his body was found with a gunshot wound in the heart area. Adviser to the Interior Minister of Ukraine Anton Gerashchenko made it clear that the mayor was killed «for supporting the LPR”.

There are already dozens of testimonies of murders and shootings of civilians.

The mass distribution of weapons to the population of Ukrainian cities should also be attributed to purely terrorist actions, from which dozens, if not hundreds of civilians have already suffered.

The economy is already dead

During the week of the military operation, the speakers in Kiev never expressed concerns about the state of the national economy. RUSSTRAT’s own sources in Ukrainian cities note that the general mobilisation announced by the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky has already led to a significant extraction from the economic life of the able-bodied male population.

In addition, hundreds of thousands of representatives of the economically active stratum of citizens have left the country, and according to the EU, the number of refugees from Ukraine can be estimated in the millions. Combined with the paralysis of the logistics of the delivery of goods, this causes much more damage to the Ukrainian economy than the ongoing military actions.

According to the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, in Kiev, Kharkov, Sumy, Odessa and Mariupol, as well as in at least two dozen large settlements, the Nazis block tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens and do not let them out to safe places.

«Such a catastrophic state of affairs is developing almost throughout the territory of Ukraine. There is practically a humanitarian catastrophe in Ukraine,» the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation said in a briefing on March 3, 2022.

Just as the military nature of actions on the territory of Ukraine is being transformed from a fight against the regular army into a counter-terrorist operation, in strategic terms, the task of restarting economic life in the liberated Ukrainian territories arises.

The humanitarian catastrophe that the Russian Defence Ministry warned about is acute, but not the only problem. Of great importance is the prevention of the shutdown of the entire economy of the regions, the economic «restart» is extremely important for the territories controlled by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, as well as the DPR and LPR and the Kherson and Nikolaev regions, which traditionally act as the centre of the entire agricultural holding of Ukraine.

In particular, it is necessary to organise the beginning of the spring sowing campaign, and then proceed to the restoration of industrial activity. Otherwise, there will be a need to supply food and other necessary goods to millions of people.

The logic of the Kiev regime in this case is very simple: the worse it is, the better. The worse the life of Ukrainians will be, the more convincing Russia’s accusations of «invasion» and the inhumane treatment of Ukrainian citizens will be. This means that it would be short-sighted to count on the humanism of Kiev in relation to its own fellow citizens.

Together with the Z-units, economists, financiers and other «civilian» specialists who will have to establish post-war life in the liberated territories should arrive right now. From the point of view of the goals set by Russia, this aspect of the operation will be no less important than the military one.

Институт международных политических и экономических стратегий Русстрат

(@russtrat)