In most Western countries, including Canada, the celebration known as the flag day is greeted with a kind of benevolent and retained enthusiasm.
It is rarely a visceral event, the way he has become in Ukraine.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy put this feeling to focus on the point of view on Saturday, one day before Prime Minister Mark Carney visited kyiv as a special guest for independence day celebrations and promises only the continuous support of Canada in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy noted that up to 20% of his country remains under the Russian occupation of 3 and a half years in a large -scale war which sees small pieces of Ukraine disappear every day.
“This flag is a goal and a dream for many Ukrainians in territories temporarily occupied by Ukraine,” said Zelenskyy. “They keep the flag. They keep it because they know that we do not offer our land to an occupant.”
More than in previous years, the flag as a symbol – and where it flies – is vital for the Ukrainians while some Western leaders speak of territorial concessions and redrawn cards with casualness in the name of the deletion of an agreement.
The feeling was only reinforced on Sunday the Ukrainians marked the 34th anniversary of their independence from the former Soviet Union.
Prime Minister Mark Carney detailed the $ 2 billion in Canada additional military aid in Ukraine during his visit to kyiv on Sunday, Ukraine’s independence day, to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. During his first official trip to the country torn apart by the war, Carney publicly undertook to reintroduce the troops in a form if there was never a cease-fire.
It was the significant event of August 24, 1991 that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to reverse, first with his war by proxy in the Eastern region of Donbas and with the large -scale invasion of February 24, 2022, which began this last war.
There are few adjectives to describe the type of war that Ukraine faces – all have been spent.
In one way or another, brutal, crushing, crushing and implacable words have lost their power to fully transmit what is happening along the front line of more than 1,000 kilometers, and the kind of life that soldiers and civilians must endure on a daily basis.
We have read on the daily rain of missiles and drones in cities, cities and villages that are in the fire line of civilians.
War on the ground is less attention.
“It’s not fair,” said soldier
In the Oblast de Sumy, a northeast province, Ukrainian troops exchange blows with a force of around 50,000 Russians, trying to repel them on the border.
A little south, the Russians recently advanced near the ruined villages of Lyman, TORETSK and VELYKOMYKHAILIVKA.
The Ukrainian forces pushed last week near the strategically vital city of Pokrovsk, in the east, where Russian troops earlier this summer organized a surprise offensive, located after being linked for months to try to break the Ukrainian supply lines.
A few kilometers here, several hundred meters there – it all paid in huge buckets of blood by both sides.
“So we continue to fight, then someone decides that we should withdraw because we have to abandon this territory or this territory?
His remarks were in response to the show of the Alaska summit, where Putin, meeting the American president Donald Trump, does not make a centimeter of his long -standing request that Ukraine yields all the Obasts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk in the south and east of the country.
Russia only controls parties of these territories, and Zelenskyy recently estimated that at the current rate in advance, Russia would take four years to fully occupy the region.
When entering the summit, Trump said kyiv and Moscow should abandon the territory in order to end the war.
Zelenskyy, however, kept the Ukrainian flag firmly planted and rejected the call when he met Trump last week at the White House.
Even again, according to a Gallup poll published in early August before the summit, 69% of Ukrainians promote a negotiated end to war as soon as possible. But a survey of public opinion in June revealed that 78% of the Ukrainians who were interviewed rejected the request for the transfer of unoccupied Ukrainian territories to the control of Russia.
In other words – peace, but not the price.
It can be a questionable point.
Russia rejected the main request from Ukraine for solid security guarantees, supported by the United States and NATO, to prevent the war from restarting a few years later.
With a stagnant front line and solidarity cracks between the troops at the front and a population shocked in war at home, Ukraine is found with few options, except to strike the Russians where they live with long -range strikes.
The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that the Pentagon had prohibited the use by Ukraine of certain long-range weapons, such as the army tactical missile system (ATM), a short-range supersonic tactical missile. The restrictions were quietly implemented following the peace process.
This did not prevent Ukraine from using drones of reach to hit Russian military and oil infrastructure in Russia and occupied Ukraine in well -published attacks.
However, the day arrives when American restrictions can become meaningless.
Zelenskyy told a press conference last week that Ukraine was planning to start mass production of its long -range flaming cruise missile developed in the country this winter.
This could upset the strategic equation with its ability to fly more up to 3,000 kilometers. Make such routine strikes would bring war to a whole new level.
