Russia’s recent mass strikes on Ukrainian cities aim to mask battlefield setbacks and to project success, despite being costly militarily, security expert Rainer Saks said.
At the same time, since civilians are the target, these strikes constitute a war crime, Saks told ERR.
Russia has been conducting waves of major air attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities over the past 10 days, with dozens of deaths resulting and hundreds more people being injured. The latest large-scale strike, involving both missiles and drones, came just last night, overnight into Tuesday morning.
Saks said Russia has previously attacked Ukrainian cities and specifically residential areas at times when Russian forces were experiencing difficulties on the front line in its invasion of Ukraine, adding the recent strikes are no different.
“Whether it is their ships having been sunk or the Ukrainian army making advances at the front, this is not an entirely new tactic. What is new this time is that Russian President Vladimir Putin explicitly announced it as a separate campaign involving missile strikes. He refers to them as retaliatory attacks, but the war has already been going on for four years—so what exactly is there left to retaliate for? This is a full-scale offensive campaign against civilian infrastructure and population, something which constitutes a war crime,” Saks said.
Read more: ERR.EE
