Russia has launched a massive rocket attack on critical infrastructure sites across Ukrainian territory, striking nearly every major city with more than one hundred missiles.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said the attack was in retaliation for the truck bombing of the Kerch Bridge last week that leads between Russia and Crimea, and his defense ministry explained it was meant to target “the objects of the military control, communications and energy systems of Ukraine”.
South Front, a war diary and international intelligence umbrella organization, has said that there is currently no power in the cities of L’viv, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Kharkov, Khmelnitsky, Poltava, Ternopol, Lutsk, Rovno, and Ivano-Frankovsk, and that the major sections of railway have been destroyed.
The Western Media and politicians have been predictably appalled, but the Western narrative on the nature of this conflict has purposely set the stage for this kind of escalation.
In June, WaL reported that a “can’t win/already lost” narrative about Russia’s campaign had been free-flowing from all major Western media outlets since the war’s onset, even while conditions on the ground carried on. Further feigned ignorance on the position of the Russian Federation’s political and military leaders has helped to disengage public opinion on what has been a massive increase in the amount of support offered to Ukraine by Western nations.
These missiles launched by Russia must be put into a wider perspective of media voices and battlefield realities.