Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Wednesday of a drawn-out military intervention in Ukraine, but seemed to tone down the nuclear rhetoric.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said six people were killed and several others wounded in fresh Russian attacks on a market and filling station in the border region of Donetsk.
With the conflict marking one year, the Russian military has missed most of its key military goals, including toppling the Ukrainian government, seizing the Donbass region and annexing four regions.
Putin’s own threatening language and military standoff have raised fears that Russia may use its nuclear arsenal to achieve military success.
But speaking at a meeting of his Human Rights Council on Wednesday, the Russian leader said: “When we are hit, we hit back,” stressing that his country’s strategy was a “so-called retaliatory strike”. Policy based.
Moscow had hoped fighting would continue for days before Ukraine surrendered, but on Wednesday Putin warned results could take a long time.
“As for the long process of (observing) the results of the special military operation, of course it is a long process,” Putin said.
But he praised the announced annexation of Ukraine’s four regions to Russia after a Moscow proxy held a referendum – condemned as a sham in the West – and announced their integration in September.
“New territories appeared – well, this is still an important result for Russia and this is a serious issue,” Putin said.
The Russian leader formalized the merger of the four southern and eastern regions – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia – at a ceremony in the Kremlin in September.
Russian shelling on the market
But Russian troops at no point fully controlled any area and last month were forced out of the regional capital of the southern Kherson region after a month-long siege. ukraine counter attack.
That same month, Putin announced that Russia was mobilizing hundreds of thousands of Russians to reinforce Moscow’s struggling army, following a series of battlefield setbacks, particularly in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine.
On Wednesday he said that half of Russians called up for military service in September have been deployed to Ukraine.
“Of our 300,000 mobilized fighters, our men, defenders of the fatherland, 150,000 are in the zone of operation,” Putin said, adding that about 77,000 were in combat units.
Since the capture of the city of Kherson, fighting in Ukraine has focused on the industrial Donbas region, where Russian forces are pushing to capture the border town of Bakhmut.
Zelensky – after visiting the border region this week – said on Wednesday that Russian forces had killed six civilians and wounded many more in recent shelling.
“Terrorists attacked the peaceful town of Kurakhov,” he said in a statement on social media.
“A market, a bus station, gas stations and residential buildings were hit by the fire. At least six civilians were killed, five were injured.”
The Donetsk region has been partially controlled by Russian forces since 2014, when Moscow-backed separatists seized control of the Donbas near the Russian border and Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula.
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