There are gunshots, stun bombs and even smoke, but none of this persuades hundreds of Ukrainians who came out to demonstrate in their city, Slavutych, in northern Kiev, against the Russian occupation.
In the shocking video he shows how civilian citizens, completely unarmed and carrying only Ukrainian flags, stoics marched through the city center, near the Chernobyl nuclear site, on Saturday, March 26.
The crowd demanded the release of Mayor Yuri Fomichev, who had been taken prisoner by Russian troops, and his persistence and courage defeated attempts by Russian troops to intimidate them. Yesterday afternoon, in fact, Fomichev was released by his captors.
After the mobilization - and the Russian failure to disperse it - it was agreed that the Russians would leave the city if only unarmed civilians remained.
“The Russians opened fire to the air. They threw rumble grenades at the crowd. But the residents did not disperse, on the contrary, more appeared,” said Oleksandr Pavlyuk, governor of the Kiev region in which Slavutych is located.
The incident illustrates the impressive resistance that Russian forces have faced even where they have won military victories.
Slavutych, with a population of 25,000, is located just outside the so-called exclusion zone around Chernobyl, which in 1986 was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in the world. The plant itself was taken over by Russian forces shortly after the start of the invasion on February 24.
After repeated threats, the Russian president gave the green light to the military invasion on February 24, hoping that the incursion would be brief and would bring an end to the government of Volodymyr Zelensky. But none of that happened. Putin did not expect the great defense power of the Ukrainian forces. Nor did he imagine the magnitude of the sanctions imposed by the United States and the Western powers.
In fact, Putin had planned to seize Ukrainian capitals a few days after announcing his “special military operation”, but he met with unexpectedly fierce resistance.
“At first they wanted a lightning war, 72 hours to control Kiev and much of Ukraine, and everything fell apart,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, President Zelensky's adviser and chief negotiator in talks with Russia, in an interview in Kiev.
“They had poor operational planning and realized that it was advantageous for them to surround cities, cut off major supply routes and force people to have a shortage of food, water and medicine,” he said, describing the siege of Mariupol as a tactic to spread psychological terror and exhaustion.
Last week NATO estimated that 40,000 Russian soldiers died, are injured, are prisoners or have been missing since the beginning of the invasion. A senior official of the Atlantic Alliance indicated that the number of fallen Russian military personnel ranges from 7,000 to 15,000.
In addition, there is speculation that Russia too would have already lost more than 10% of its equipment, which seriously impairs its ability to keep pace with operations.
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