Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, has condemned Russia’s mass strike on Ukraine on Monday morning, describing it as horrific.
Stoltenberg tweeted condemnation of Russia’s “horrific & indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure.”
He said: “NATO will continue supporting the brave Ukrainian people to fight back against the Kremlin’s aggression for as long as it takes.”
On Monday morning, Russia launched 75 missiles toward Ukraine but Forty-one of those missiles were struck down by air defenses, said Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi.
Explosions were heard in Kyiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Lviv, Zhytomyr, Kharkiv and Ternopil.
Two missiles landed in quick succession on the edges of Shevchenko Park in central Kyiv, one striking a busy intersection next to a major university.
The second hit a children’s playground in a park about 20 metres away from apartment blocks.
TheNewsGuru.com recalls that France President, Emmanuel Macron, had said Russia cannot be allowed to win the war in Ukraine, as Germany and France toughened their stance.
“I really hope that the end [of the conflict] can be achieved by the end of the year, with a certainty and a desire, which is that Russia cannot and must not win,” the French president said at a news conference at the G7 summit.
TheNewsGuru.com reports that the missiles came two days after an explosion damaged the only bridge from Russia to the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow seized from Kyiv in 2014.
Russia did not succeed in hitting any military targets in Ukraine, as most of the targets were civilian critical infrastructure responsible for providing heat and electricity.
“With all these strikes across all the territory of Ukraine, they did not hit one military target only civilian ones,” an advisor to Ukraine’s president, Oleksiy Arestovych said in an interview.
Sergei Surovikin, the man that Russia’s forces in Ukraine on Monday mass strikes
Amid fury in Moscow on Saturday over the partial destruction of the Crimea bridge, Russian President, Vladimir Putin, appointed Sergei Surovikin- a man with a reputation for brutality and ruthlessness- to lead Russia’s forces in Ukraine.
Experts say this morning’s bombing of Ukraine’s capital appeared to bear all his hallmarks.
A military veteran who served in the Soviet Union’s ultimately doomed war with Afghanistan during the 1980s, the 55-year-old is infamous for ordering troops to open fire on pro-democracy protesters in Moscow in 1991.
He went on to lead Russian forces’ intervention during the Syrian War in 2017.
There, he was allegedly complicit in the indiscriminate bombing of opposition fighters and of overseeing chemical weapons attacks, in a campaign thought to have been pivotal in helping Syria’s government regain control over most of the country.
His appointment has raised fears that Russia could be about to shift towards a major escalation of its war with Ukraine – and that it could increase the risk that nuclear weapons might be used.
Putin’s warning on harsh response, if attacks continue against Russia
According to Putin, the hit was revenge for an attack on a key Russian bridge on Saturday.
He warned that “if attacks continue against Russia, the response will be harsh.”
In his words: “To leave without an answer to a crime of such a type is already simply impossible. This morning, at the proposal of Russia’s ministry of defense and general staff, a massive strike of high precision, long-range weapons have been delivered from air, land and sea, on Ukraine’s energy facilities, military command and communication.
“In the case of continuing terrorist attack on our territory, the answers from Russia will be severe and by their scale correspond to the level of threat created for the Russian Federation. No one should have any doubts about that.”
