Situation Update: The War in Ukraine
Foreign Policy #160 | By: Ibrahim Castro | September 24, 2024
Featured Photo: www.nbcnews.com
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Zelensky Travels to the US
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is visiting the United States this week to lay out his “victory plan” to the White House, in an attempt to shift policy on Ukraine’s war with Russia. The Ukrainian leader has said he wants to present the plan to President Joe Biden and his two potential successors, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It is expected that Zelenskiy will likely press for longer-term assurances of aid into 2025 and seek some kind of declaration of post-Biden continuity in support. This is due to Trump’s proposals of cutting aid and weapons to Ukraine. Also on the agenda will be the repeated ask of Ukraine, to be allowed to use long range American weapons to hit targets inside Russian territory. Ukraine reportedly wants the capability to strike military installations up to 186 miles inside Russia, such as airfields that host attack helicopters and warplanes used to fire missiles. The US has been unwilling to allow that up until now, fearing a confrontation between the US and Russia. Putin has warned that allowing long-range strikes against Russian targets would mean that NATO was “at war” with Russia. Zelensky will also be addressing the U.N. General Assembly in New York later this week.
Waging war across borders
On September 18, Ukraine conducted one of the largest drone attacks of the entire war, causing a blast at a weapons depot inside Russia that was large enough to be picked up by earthquake monitoring stations. The attack involved more than one hundred domestically produced long-range Ukrainian drones and targeted a major Russian arms storage facility in Toropets, a town northwest of Moscow. Two weeks ago Ukraine targeted the Russian capital, killing one person, wrecking dozens of homes in Moscow, and forcing flights to be diverted from airports around the capital. It was the first attack against the Russian capital that resulted in a civilian death since the start of the war. The increasing frequency and effectiveness of drone attacks would appear to lend credibility to Ukraine’s decision to focus its limited resources on boosting the domestic development and production of long-range drones. Ukrainian attacks are now visibly expanding in scale as more drones are produced.
On August 6, 2024, Ukraine began an incursion into the Russian Kursk region, capturing territory inside Russia for the first time. At least 56 civilians are reported to have been killed and 266 wounded during the now seven-week-old incursion. President Zelenskiy has said that his forces controlled more than 100 settlements in the Kursk region. Russian officials dispute this number and say they have since taken back some villages in a counter-attack. The main aim of the incursion into the Kursk region was primarily to create another front and draw Russian forces away from the occupied Donbas region in Ukraine.
Russian missiles meanwhile continue to cause civilian casualties within Ukraine. In the city of Poltava earlier this month, two ballistic missiles hit a military academy and a nearby hospital, killing more than 50 people and wounding more than 200 others. This attack was one of the deadliest Russian strikes since the war began.
ICC visits Ukraine to investigate war crimes
The International Criminal Court”s ( ICC )chief prosecutor Karim Khan recently conducted his sixth trip to Ukraine where he visited a children’s hospital destroyed by a missile strike, spoke to victims of alleged crimes committed in detention facilities, and held an event with Ukraine’s first lady on Russian war crimes against Ukrainian children. In March 2023 the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and though not as widely reported, more warrants for Russian officials were put out this year. One for Russia’s former defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the chief of general staff, Valery Gerasimov. Andriy Kostin is in charge of the court prosecution system in the country and has called on the ICC to investigate Russian attacks as war crimes, and said that every legal avenue would be pursued against Russia. “There is no statute of limitations for the time… We understand that our work is for years, maybe for decades, but our commitment is to do it as soon as possible” he said.
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