Barely noticeable, but the geographical scope of the war in Ukraine has begun to shift in recent months:
Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow and other major Russian cities have become almost daily.
Crimea is no longer taboo for Ukrainian attacks.
Recently, peaceful, calm Western Ukraine was hit by a missile strike of such force which has not been observed since the beginning of the war.
On 6 July, a Russian missile attack on the center of Lviv, Western Ukraine, caused the collapse of several residential buildings and killed at least ten people.
As one of the main routes for arms transports and humanitarian supplies, the Polish-Ukrainian border has played an important role in the war since the very beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Heads of states and other politicians visiting war-torn Ukraine usually arrive in Kyiv from Poland, often by rail.
Ukraine’s Lviv, Transcarpathian and Chernivtsi regions can be described as islands of peace in war-torn Ukraine. So far, an estimated 5 million IDPs have found temporary refuge in various regions of Ukraine, including the aforementioned three Western Ukrainian ’oblasts’.
(Lviv region borders Poland, Transcarpathia – Hungary and Slovakia, and Chernivtsi – Romania. For geographic and historical reasons, the share of national minorities is high in the three mentioned Ukrainian regions. According to pre-war statistics, there were about half a million Ukrainian citizens of Polish, Hungarian and Romanian nationalities in these three regions.)
In wartime, the logic of the hostile attacks is quite simple: it is extremely important to destroy the logistic infrastructure and all kinds of arms production and repair facilities and warehouses.
Given my general knowledge about the composition of the national minorities in Western Ukraine, and considering the general information outlined above, I was very surprised to read the news a few months ago that the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall was building an arms maintenance and logistics centre in Satu Mare, Romania, not far from Ukraine, and that Ukraine and Slovakia decided to create a joint self-propelled artillery howitzer, therefore, the Slovak state-owned company Konstrukta Defence and the Kramatorsk Heavy Machine Tool Plant signed a memorandum of cooperation.
’The service hub (in Satu Mare) should play a central role in maintaining the operational readiness of western combat systems in use in Ukraine and ensuring the availability of logistical support,’ a spokesperson for the German Rheinmetall company said, leaving no doubts about the role of the new hub in Romania in the ongoing war.
Do not Romania and Slovakia have concerns that by setting up arms factories and hubs, they themselves create targets for attacks? I do not mean that Russia is going to attack the two NATO members mentioned, but rather that it would prefer to attack targets in Western Ukraine. So, it seems to me that Slovakia and Romania, for some reasons I do not understand, deliberately ’lure’ Russian missiles to Western Ukraine.
The question arises: who and why would have an interest in turning Western Ukraine, an island of peace into a war zone? After all, we are talking about the part of Ukraine which over the past year and a half has given shelter to millions of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war.
The parliaments of Slovakia and Poland have designated Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. Not only these two countries, but Romania as well, actively support Kyiv in every possible way, including by supplying Ukraine with military equipment and ammunition, in addition, they organise various training programmes to Ukrainian soldiers.
According to a recent poll, the majority of Slovaks believe that the next government of Slovakia should stop supporting Ukraine. Similar voices can be heard in Poland.
If so, then why provoke deadly Russian missile strikes on Western Ukraine?!
It seems to me that economic interests dominate over moral values. And this makes me very sad.
Leave a Reply