Ukraine in Focus
By Svitlana Morenets
July 12, 2024
- Joe Biden mistakenly called Volodymyr Zelensky ‘President Putin’ while introducing him at the Nato summit last night. More below.
- The summit in Washington ended with 32 countries signing the Ukraine Compact, with members pledging to support Ukraine’s defence. They described Ukraine’s path to Nato membership as ‘irreversible’.
- The US and at least nine other Nato allies agreed to send ‘dozens’ of air defence systems to Ukraine in the coming months.
- A Russian missile hit a children’s cancer hospital in Kyiv on Monday during a mass attack on Ukraine. Read my report from the scene here.
- The British Ministry of Defence will not allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow missiles inside Russia, despite Keir Starmer saying he was loosening the restriction.
- A Russian pilot has leaked personnel data to Kyiv that helped identify 30 commanders of the Russian heavy bomber aviation division.
- Poland won’t shoot down Russian missiles over the west of Ukraine without Nato’s approval, according to the Polish defence minister.
- Russia lacks the munitions and soldiers needed to launch a new major offensive in Ukraine, Reuters reported.
- The first F-16 fighter jets are on their way from the Netherlands and Denmark to Ukraine, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced.
- Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian oil refinery sites reportedly caused the volume of Russia’s oil refining to fall by around 17%.
- The number of female soldiers serving on front lines has surged to more than 10,000, Ukraine’s deputy PM said.
- Warsaw has started to prepare the first Ukrainian brigade consisting of ‘hundreds’ of Ukrainian volunteers in Poland.
- Denmark has become the first country to donate arms to Ukraine via direct purchases from the Ukrainian defence industry. Ukraine will receive 18 Denmark-funded Bohdana artillery units ‘within months’.
- Kyiv wants to hold a second peace summit before the US presidential election and aims to invite a Russian representative. Russia has said it won’t attend.
Wider reading on the war
What I saw at the Okhmatdyt bomb site – The Spectator
Russian missile identified in Kyiv Children’s Hospital attack – Bellingcat
The cost of Biden’s complacency in Ukraine – The Hill
Nato’s ‘Bridge’ to Ukraine is a ramp to nowhere – Bloomberg
The analysis
Biden calls Zelensky ‘President Putin’
‘Now I want to hand it over to the President of Ukraine who has as much courage as he has determination. Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin,’ Joe Biden told the Nato 75th anniversary summit in Washington DC last night. The room, filled with diplomats and world leaders from around the globe, erupted with claps – and gasps. A few called out, ‘Zelensky!’, before the US President corrected himself, saying: ‘We’re gonna beat President Putin. President Zelensky. I was so focused on beating Putin.’
Zelensky, fighting not to react, answered: ‘I’m better [than Putin].’ ‘You are, a hell of a lot better,’ Biden replied. The Ukrainian President didn’t appear offended but rather concerned. The lack of coherence and confidence in Biden’s speeches is harming his chances in the November elections. Donald Trump, on the other side, seems bold and sharp. While Nato leaders gathered to discuss, among other things, the strengthening of Ukraine’s defences, Trump met with Victor Orban, a Putin sympathiser. The Hungarian Prime Minister has just finished his Kyiv-Moscow-Beijing ‘peacemaking’ trip and rushed to report it to Trump.
‘We discussed ways to make peace. The good news of the day: he’s [Trump] going to solve it,’ Orban said. While no details of their conversation have emerged, a letter written by Orban to the European Council has been leaked. In it, Orban says that Putin is ‘ready to consider any ceasefire proposal’ that would not entail what the Russian President calls ‘relocation and reorganisation of Ukrainian forces’ (one of Putin’s demands is to slash the size of Ukraine’s military – Kyiv believes it will be used by Moscow for future invasion). Orban said that, according to Putin, ‘time is not on the side of Ukraine, but on the side of the Russian forces’, and that more bloodshed is to come.
Orban’s peacemaking mission certainly failed when Russian forces bombed a children’s hospital in Kyiv on Monday. It took the Hungarian PM more than a day to comment on the atrocity. In his tweet, Orban did not express condolences to the victims, nor did he mention that Russia was behind the assault, referring to it only as a ‘tragic and heinous attack in Kyiv’, which he said proves that ‘the brutality of the Russian-Ukrainian war has reached a new level’. Then Zelensky rubbished Orban’s peacemaking attempts, saying that only world powers such as China, the US or EU could mediate the talks between Russia and Ukraine.
Across Ukraine, at least 42 people were killed and more than 190 injured during brutal Russian missile attacks on Monday. They happened in the midst of Orban’s peace trip and had no military sense rather than inviting a new round of escalation. When someone wants to negotiate, even on their own terms, they don’t terrorise civilians and bomb hospitals. No Ukrainian government will talk to Putin while children’s clothes are being pulled from under the rubble. Even if Trump wins the US presidency and cuts all US aid, there’s a strong possibility that Ukrainians will continue fighting regardless. That is one of the worst-case scenarios for Ukraine.
In pictures
Kyiv: Children are given their cancer treatments via drips after a Russian missile struck the Okhmatdyt cancer hospital (Ukraine’s Ministry of Health)
Quote of the week
‘We understand from what military base they attack us. If they attacked us, and killed our children in the hospital, that is a crazy question why we can’t answer and attack this… military base where from these guided bombs from jets, or missiles came, targeted us, killed our children.’
– Volodymyr Zelensky on the US restrictions to strike deep inside Russia with American weapons
The war in numbers
Civilians sheltering in the Kyiv metro:
32,000
During Monday’s deadly air raid
Ukrainians donate to repair children’s hospital damaged in Russian airstrike
£6m
Citizens raised the money within two days
Ukrainians who have illegally fled to Moldova:
23,000
Since the start of the full-scale invasion
A note from the author: Thank you for your interest in this newsletter. I hope it helps you to understand my country – and the war – better from a Ukrainian perspective. If you enjoy the Ukraine in Focus newsletter, please forward it to someone you know: you can sign up here. My writing for The Spectator can be found here. All feedback is welcome: svitlana@spectator.co.uk
……….
A natural companion piece to this is Zel’s comment to the EUROMAIDAN PRESS:
“Even 50 is nothing” – Zelenskyy says Ukraine needs 128 F-16 jets
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called for 128 F-16 fighter jets to counter Russia’s daily deployment of 300 aircraft against Ukraine.
10/07/2024
Svitlana is a reporter, not a polemicist. Nevertheless, she makes an incredible powerful and poignant point here :
“No Ukrainian government will talk to Putin while children’s clothes are being pulled from under the rubble. Even if Trump wins the US presidency and cuts all US aid, there’s a strong possibility that Ukrainians will continue fighting regardless. That is one of the worst-case scenarios for Ukraine.”
You could hardly get worse. Trumpkov’s nazi friend from a piss-ass country; fellow putinoid toad Orban, boasts of a “solution.”
It will be the “final solution” if putler gets his way. How many times has putler deliberately murdered Ukrainian children and how many putinaZi social media posts have gloated and glorified such obscene horror?
The answer is : 1/ far too many and 2/ innumerable.
You don’t “negotiate” with people who have come to kill you.
Uk, Belgium, Poland have joined my list of useless. frightened idiotic countries along with the US. These fuckin countries are quick to send troops and armaments to Afghanistan but leave their neighbor in their backyard helpless only giving second hand equipment. Fuckin all!!!