Escalation: Putin Vows to 'Finish Off' Ukrainian Troops Following Russia's Cease-Fire Violation
By Ward Clark
Things may be heating up again in Ukraine. On Friday, Russia's Vladimir Putin ordered strikes on a Ukrainian energy facility after threatening to "finish off" Ukrainian troops. The act is a violation of a partial cease-fire that was in place after American-mediated discussions between Russia and Ukraine.
Moscow forces attacked the outpost in Kherson Thursday, breaching the precarious deal calling for a halt to military action in the Black Sea and a pause in long-range attacks on energy infrastructure.
Putin, who had said that Moscow would end its strikes on Ukrainian energy targets, called on his troops to continue pushing forward into Ukraine and even step up their attacks.
“I was saying not so long ago: ‘We will finish them off.’ There are reasons to believe that we will finish them off,” Putin said while attending the International Arctic Forum in Murmansk, according to the AFP.
“We are gradually, not as fast as some would like, but nevertheless persistently and confidently moving toward achieving all the goals stated at the beginning of the special operation,” the Kremlin leader added.
The cease-fire agreement had included an agreement to end attacks specifically targeting energy facilities:
After discussions in Saudi Arabia this week, the White House said the warring countries had agreed to “develop measures to implement the agreement to ban strikes against energy facilities in Russia and Ukraine.”
Those talks were sequestered at Moscow’s request, so while both Ukrainian and Russian parties were in Saudi Arabia at the same time, the delegations did not speak to each other.
Washington wants the warring nations to engage in talks with each other, but they must first “build confidence” in each other — which could happen if both sides adhere to the partial cease-fires, Special Presidential Envoy to Ukraine Gen. Keith Kellogg told The Post on Tuesday.
“President Trump wants to see both Ukraine and Russia in talks together,” Kellogg said. “The question of settling when and how that happens will be the result of what we call confidence-building measures over time.”
It would seem that this notion of building confidence has just taken a big step backwards.
On Wednesday, President Trump, who has made ending the Russo-Ukraine War a foreign policy priority, accused Tsar Vladimir I of "dragging his feet" in peace talks. This may well prove a prescient observation. The conflict has, over much of the battlespace, deteriorated into a war of attrition, a sort of high-tech version of the Great War. In such a conflict, while both sides suffer greatly, Russia has more men and more equipment to throw into the mix than Ukraine does, although it's not clear how big their advantage is. Russia is feeling the pinch; recent reports indicate that the Russian Army is sending T-55 tanks into the fray, tanks that first entered service with the Soviet Red Army in 1955. These are museum relics, and Russia is reported to have less than 500 of them to send into the fight. What's more, they are painfully vulnerable to modern anti-armor weapons.
As of this writing, the White House has not responded to Putin's latest comments.
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