Ukraine celebrated 31 years of its independence in a minor tone, for fear of a sensational attack by the Russians, but the message sent to the enemy was far from muted.
"
We will fight to the end, without any compromise
," President
Volodymyr Zelensky
said, addressing the nation.
Collecting the renewed support of all Western leaders, starting with Boris Johnson, who flew to Kiev by surprise.
The much feared Russian provocation, at least on the capital, did not happen.
But
a massacre resulted from a Russian missile attack on a railway station
in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba posted photos of the Russian raid on Twitter.
Terrorist Russia keeps killing Ukrainian civilians.
At least 15 killed in a Russian missile strike on a train station in Chaplyne, Dnipropetrovsk region.
As @ZelenskyyUa stressed at UNSC: terrorist Russia must be stopped now before it kills more people in Ukraine and beyond.
pic.twitter.com/GSbMbrYEc2
- Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) August 24, 2022
And signals have come from Washington that could open the doors to a further escalation of the conflict: Moscow is in fact preparing "
farce referendum
" in all occupied Ukrainian areas, and could announce the first this week.
The center of Kiev, on the anniversary day which coincided with the sixth month of the war, did not host the traditional military parade, for security reasons, because the authorities prohibited public gatherings.
The celebrations nevertheless had an important significance, of which Zelensky became the spokesperson.
"For us - assured the president in a video intervention with the monument for independence in the background - Ukraine is the whole of Ukraine, all 25 regions, without concessions or compromises. It doesn't matter what army you have. what counts is our land and we will fight for this until the end ".
Zelensky: 'We will fight to the end, no compromise'
The challenge to Vladimir Putin, therefore, is launched, even for the territories that the Tsar considers indispensable, such as Crimea and the Donbass.
So much so that in Moscow, according to the spokesman for the National Security Council of the White House, John Kirby, a series of "farce referendums" are being worked on not only in Donetsk and Lugansk but also in Kherson, Zaporizhizhia and Kharkiv.
Replicas of the vote organized in Crimea in 2014, which sanctioned its annexation to Russia.
Independence day for Zelensky was an opportunity to receive the renewed
support of the main NATO allies
, from Joe Biden to Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, for Italy from
Sergio Mattarella
and Mario Draghi (the head of state defined "legitimizes Kiev's resistance" to "brutal Russian aggression").
Boris Johnson
went further by visiting his fellow in camouflage.
The resigning British premier, the only leader to fly to Ukraine three times since the war, has assured that those who succeed him in Downing Street will also remain alongside Kiev.
"I believe Ukraine can win and it will win," he said, promising additional $ 56 million military aid, which includes state-of-the-art drones and missile launching systems.
Ukrainian Independence Day, Boris Johnson in Kiev
The new aid package allocated by the United States is much bigger: almost 3 billion dollars.
"The largest tranche of security assistance provided to date,"
Biden
recalled .
In Kiev, the day passed without attacks, although alarm sirens rang out several times in the capital.
In Moscow, the media have chosen not to give too much prominence to the anniversary, rather insisting on accusations against the enemy of "crimes" against civilians.
Quite the opposite of what the Russians are doing is Defense Minister Serghiei Shoigu's version that "the offensive was deliberately slowed down to avoid casualties" among the population by conducting "precision" attacks on "military infrastructure" .
In any case, the Russian bombs have continued to fall.
In the evening it was Zelensky himself who announced the massacre at Chaplyne station, in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast: at least 15 people were killed and 50 were injured.
The south and the Donbass, from Kharkiv and Dnipro, to Zaporizhzhia are in the sights of Moscow.
Local Ukrainian authorities reported that the infrastructure of the city hosting the nuclear power plant was hit and an employee of the plant was reportedly killed by a mortar shell while aboard a taxi.
The tense situation around the largest power plant in Europe was among the issues at the center of a meeting of the UN Security Council.
Zelensky in his remote speech stated that the enemy's raids on Zaporizhzhia "put the
Aiea, imminent mission to Zaporizhzhia
"Important technical discussions today in Istanbul regarding the imminent mission of the International Atomic Energy Agency to the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in Ukraine".
The Director General of the UN atomic agency Rafael Mariano Grossi wrote it on Twitter, publishing a photo in which he is in conversation with Alexei Likhachev, the general director of the Russian state atomic energy agency Rosatom.
A nuclear power plant employee and his driver were killed by a Russian mortar round outside the plant, according to the president of the Ukrainian atomic agency Energoatom, Petro Kotin, in an interview with the Washington Post, explaining that Vladyslav Mitin was killed while in a taxi and entering the central area.
Russian forces bombed two districts in the Zaporizhzhia region, about sixty kilometers from the Ukrainian nuclear plant of the same name: the president of the regional military administration, Oleksandr, announced this on Telegram, according to UNIAN.
"The invaders' rockets hit the infrastructure in the Shevchenkovsky and Kommunarsky districts. There is no information on any casualties," Starukh wrote.
