The Independent Online: Why is Russia fighting Ukraine?

The Independent Online newspaper published a report on the Russian-Ukrainian war, discussing, why did Russia invade Ukraine.

The report says that the “special operation” that Russia launched more than a year ago has turned into an ongoing conflict that causes thousands of casualties, and forces millions to abandon their homes and flee to places far from the fighting.

The Russian president started the war, claiming that Ukraine must be “disarmed and liberated from the Nazis,” and took this as an excuse to carve out some regions and annex them to his country, in the face of “Ukraine, which is headed by a Jewish person, Volodymyr Zelensky”.

The report shows that most of the fighting is currently concentrated in the eastern regions of Ukraine, especially the city of Bakhmut, which is witnessing the heaviest artillery shelling during Russia’s attempts to achieve a symbolic military victory during the raging war, especially since Ukraine managed to restore several areas of Russian control in the autumn counter-offensive.

The most prominent of which were Kharkiv and Kherson.

The report notes that the more Ukraine succeeds in confronting the Russian army, the more Putin gets angry and threatens to use nuclear weapons.

The report also quotes Zelensky as saying that Russian officials have begun to “prepare society for the possibility of using nuclear weapons,” but he believes that the Kremlin isn’t yet ready to use them.

Despite this, Zelensky calls on the international community to take action to confront this dangerous scenario, stressing that the use of nuclear weapons “will pose a threat to the entire planet, and that Moscow has already begun taking steps to do so by controlling the Zaporizhya plant,” the largest nuclear plant in Europe.

The report refers to Putin’s televised speech last September, in which he announced the call-up of about 300,000 reservists, in a partial mobilization process, reiterating his threats to use nuclear weapons against the West.

The report also indicates that things almost got out of control at the end of last year, when what appeared to be a Russian missile fell in Poland, killing two people, which could have been interpreted as a military attack on a NATO member, which may call for a unified response from the alliance militarily.

But it turned out that it was a Ukrainian missile from the era of the former Soviet Union, which was launched to shoot down an air target near the western city of Lviv, and deviated from its course to fall across the border in Poland.

The report concludes that although the incident passed peacefully, it should show us how quickly things can develop and veer off a very dangerous path.