KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday ordered a primary buildup of his country’s armed forces in a blatant effort to rebuild troops that suffered heavy losses in six months of bloody warfare and prepare for a long and bitter war. fight to come in Ukraine.
The resolution to increase the number of troops from thirteen7,000, or thirteen percent, to 1. 15 million by the end of the year came amid terrifying advances in Ukraine:
Fueling fears of a nuclear disaster, the Zaporizhzhia force plant amid fighting in southern Ukraine was briefly shut down via a chimney on a transmission line, the government said. necessary to operate the plant.
“Russia has put Ukraine and all Europeans one step away from a radioactive catastrophe,” Zelenskyy said in his late-night video speech.
The death toll from a Russian rocket attack on an exercise station and its landscape rose to 25, the Ukrainian government said. Wednesday on Ukraine’s Independence Day.
Putin’s decree did not specify whether the expansion would be completed by expanding the project, recruiting more volunteers, or both. But some Russian military analysts have predicted greater reliance on volunteers because of the Kremlin’s considerations of an imaginable internal reaction from a larger project.
This resolution will bring all Russian armed forces to 2. 04 million, 1. 15 million soldiers.
Western estimates of the number of Russian deaths in the war in Ukraine range from more than 15,000 to more than 20,000, more than the Soviet Union lost its 10-year war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon said last week that up to 80,000 Russian troops had been killed or wounded, eroding Moscow’s ability to carry out primary offensives.
The Kremlin said only hired volunteer infantrymen are participating in the war in Ukraine. But it can be tricky to locate more willing infantrymen, and army analysts have said planned troop grades would possibly still be inadequate for operations.
Retired Russian Colonel Viktor Murakhovsky said in comments broadcast through Moscow-based online media outlet RBC that the Kremlin would most likely remain dependent on volunteers, and predicted this would account for most of the increase.
Another Russian army expert, Alexei Leonkov, noted that education on complex fashionable weapons takes 3 years. And recruits serve only one year.
“A draft will not help in this, so there will be no increase in the number of recruits,” Leonkov was quoted as saying by the official RIA Novosti news agency.
Fears of a Chernobyl-type crisis are heightened in Ukraine because of the fighting around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia plant. Ukraine and Russia accused others of bombing the site.
In Thursday’s incident, the plant was cut off from the power grid, leading to a blackout in the region, according to authorities. The complex was then reconnected to the power grid, a local Official founded in Russia said.
Not without delay, the Ukrainian force government made it clear whether the dashed line used outgoing electric power or incoming electric power to run the plant. But Zelenskyy’s mention of backup turbines implied that the power source was affected. Incoming electrical power is needed to run the reactors. ‘ important cooling systems.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine would have faced a radiological twist of fate if the diesel turbines had not been switched on.
He blamed the chimney that broke the transmission line on Russian bombing. But the Russian regional governor of Zaporizhzhia, Yevgeny Balitsky, blamed a Ukrainian attack.
While the incident is said not to have affected the reactors’ cooling systems, the loss of which can lead to collapse, it fueled fears of a disaster.
“The scenario is incredibly dangerous,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said. “I am receiving data that there are fires in the forest near the force plant. We still want to look at this factor further. “
Elsewhere on the war front, the fatal attack on the exercise station in Chaplyne, a city of about 3,500 people in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, came as Ukraine prepared for attacks similar to the national holiday and six months of war, which fell on Wednesday.
The deputy director of Ukraine’s presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, did not say whether the other 25 people killed were all civilians. If they were, it would be one of the deadliest attacks on civilians in weeks. Another 31 people were reportedly injured.
Witnesses said some of the victims, at least one child, were burned alive while passing cars or exercise cars.
“Everything turned to dust,” said Olena Budnyk, a 65-year-old Chaplyne resident. “There was a dust storm. We couldn’t see anything. We didn’t know where to run. “
The dead included an 11-year-old boy discovered under the rubble of a space and a 6-year-old boy killed in the chimney of a car near the exercise station, the government said.
The Russian Defense Ministry said its forces used an Iskander missile to attack an army exercise carrying Ukrainian troops and aircraft on the front line in eastern Ukraine. The ministry claimed that more than two hundred reservists “were destroyed on their way to the combat zone. “
The attack served as a painful reminder of Russia’s continued ability to inflict suffering on a large scale. Wednesday’s National Day celebrated Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Tetyana Kvitnytska, deputy director of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Health Department, said those injured in the attack on the station suffered head injuries, damaged limbs, burns and shrapnel wounds.
After the attacks in which civilians were killed, the Russian government has continuously claimed that its forces are targeting only valid military targets. to the accusation of curbing its offensive in Ukraine.
In April, a Russian missile attack on an exercise station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk killed more than 50 people as crowds composed mainly of women and youths tried to flee the fighting. The attack was denounced as a war crime.
On Thursday in Moscow, Dmitry Medvedev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council, said Western hopes for a Ukrainian victory were in vain and that they were under pressure for the Kremlin to insist on what he called the “army’s special operation,” leaving only two imaginable results.
“One is for all the goals of the army’s special operation and the popularity of this result in Kyiv,” Medvedev said on his messaging app channel. “The moment is a military coup in Ukraine followed by the popularity of the effects of the special operation. “
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