The attack on a DIY store in Kharkiv shows the Russian president’s cynical calculations – This is why Putin wants this city at all costs (translation in comments)

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1. Translation:

   The attack on a DIY store shows the entire cynical calculation of the Russian president. And it reveals the dilemma that is currently plaguing Ukraine.

   Thick black smoke billows out of the building in huge plumes. Flames blaze meters high. The scenes on the site of a DIY store in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv resemble an inferno. It is hard to imagine that anyone could survive this hell of flames. And yet the Ukrainian authorities report 44 people, some of them seriously injured, who were rescued from the DIY store after an attack by Russian glide bombs. For 14 others, all help came too late; they burned to death, suffocated or were torn apart by the bomb fragments that tore the market apart on Saturday.

   This is the war of aggression that Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin is waging against Ukraine. Death comes from the air. Unpredictable. Where a moment ago people, tradesmen, fathers and mothers were pushing their shopping carts through the department store, the rescue workers were soon wading through piles of ash and charred remains. This can be seen, among other things, on videos that were distributed from the scene of the attack. They are hard to bear.

   An employee of the DIY store told Reuters that both hits occurred shortly after each other. “I heard the first hit and my colleague and I fell to the ground,” said 26-year-old Dmytro Syrotenko, who was injured in the face. “There was a second hit and we were covered in debris.”

   The attack occurred at around 4pm in the afternoon. At least 200 people are said to have been in the store at the time. 400 rescue workers and firefighters were deployed to the DIY store site throughout the weekend. It took a total of 16 hours to bring the fire under control.

   However, the rescue workers themselves were probably not the target of the attack this time. In the past, Russia is said to have repeatedly used the tactic of so-called “double tap” attacks, in which two bombs hit within minutes of each other, killing many of the rescuers who arrived. A particularly cynical approach that usually results in a high number of civilian casualties.

   This seems to be deliberate. Putin’s troops have been attacking the city of Kharkiv with undiminished ferocity for months, and even though the Kremlin denies carrying out attacks on the civilian population, Russian bombs hit civilian buildings almost every day.

   Just last Thursday, bombs destroyed a large printing house in Kharkiv. Videos shared by Ukrainian officials showed the remains of 50,000 charred books next to the burnt beyond recognition bodies of seven victims of the attack. The people of Ukraine were in shock at the images, especially the residents of Kharkiv. That is saying something in a country that has been fighting a barbaric war of aggression with thousands of civilian casualties for more than two years.

   Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky published a video on Sunday that was filmed in the ruins of the printing plant. He appealed to US President Joe Biden and China’s head of state Xi Jinping: “We don’t want the UN Charter to be burned like these books here, and I hope you don’t want that either,” he said. Both should therefore come to the peace conference to be held in Switzerland in June.

   Selensky spoke of Russian “terrorism” in view of the attacks against the civilian population. While the Russian military later claimed that a weapons cache had been hidden in the DIY store, the Ukrainian president condemned the attack as “another manifestation of Russian madness”. He once again asked the West for more equipment to protect the civilian population.

   A request that has long been eloquently by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz with many words, for example. However, the German government is still finding it difficult to provide Ukraine with the military resources it needs to defend itself against Russian attacks. It is also critical of Ukraine’s plan to be allowed to use Western weapons systems to attack Russian soil. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for example, recently no longer ruled this out. However, SPD Chancellor Scholz rejected this proposal.

   At a public discussion at the Democracy Festival in Berlin on Sunday, Scholz said in response to the question of when he would allow the Ukrainian armed forces to fire on Russian territory with these weapons: “We have clear rules agreed with Ukraine for the arms deliveries we have made so far. And they work. At least that’s my thesis.”

   Green Party European politician Anton Hofreiter disagrees with the Chancellor. “This is about protecting the Ukrainian population. We should therefore not prevent Ukraine from using the supplied weapons to fend off Russian fighter jets in Russian airspace,” the chairman of the Bundestag’s Europe Committee told the Funke Mediengruppe newspaper. “International law allows an attacked state to attack military targets in the aggressor’s country.”

   The problem with attacks like the one on the hardware store in Kharkiv is that Russia does not even have to get close to Ukrainian defensive weapons to carry out the devastating attacks. It is sufficient for its bombers to fire their deadly cargo behind the border, i.e. still on Russian territory. The glide bombs will then cover the rest of the distance on their own. If Ukraine were allowed to attack Russian positions on Russian territory, this would cause great damage to the Russian army. However, Ukraine would have to use Western weapons with the appropriate range for this.

   “Ukraine is basically begging for its equipment,” says military expert Ralph Thiele in an interview with “ntv.de”. The government in Kiev must “show consideration for those who give it weapons”, says Thiele. In view of the images from Kharkiv, more and more observers are wondering how the country can adequately defend itself against the Russian bombardments in the coming weeks and months.

   President Zelensky is therefore continuing to exert pressure. Following the attack on the construction market in Kharkiv, he once again called on Ukraine’s Western allies to supply his country with more air defense systems. “If Ukraine had enough air defense systems and modern fighter planes, such Russian attacks would be impossible,” the president explained. “Every day we appeal to the world: give us air defense, save people.”

   For Zelensky and his generals, the situation is an enormous dilemma: on the one hand, the Ukrainian president must not alienate his Western allies diplomatically; on the other hand, parts of the front are gradually threatening to collapse under the growing military pressure from the Russians. This is also a consequence of the slow arrival of arms supplies from the West. Moreover, in the third year of the war, the will to hold out no longer seems to be as strong among both the soldiers and the civilian population as it was in the spring and summer of 2022.

   … continued in reply to this comment…

2. This shit needs to be remembered and brought out each time the tankies and propagandists claim that Russia “isn’t really that bad” and is “only defending itself”.