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| Photo Credit: AP. |
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia’s rush to mobilize hundreds of thousands of recruits to staunch stinging losses in Ukraine is a tacit acknowledgement that its “army is not able to fight,” Ukraine’s president said Sunday, as splits sharpened in Europe over whether to welcome or turn away Russians fleeing the call-up.
Speaking to
U.S. broadcaster CBS, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also said he’s
bracing for more Russian strikes on Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure, as the
Kremlin seeks to ramp up the pressure on Ukraine and its Western backers as the
weather gets colder. Zelenskyy warned that this winter “will be very
difficult.”
“They will
shoot missiles, and they will target our electric grid. This is a challenge,
but we are not afraid of that.” he said on “Face the Nation.”
He portrayed
the Russian mobilization — its first such call-up since World War II — as a
signal of weakness, not strength, saying: “They admitted that their army is not
able to fight with Ukraine anymore.”
Zelenskyy
also said Ukraine has received NASAMS air defense systems from the U.S. NASAMS
uses surface-to-air missiles to track and shoot down incoming missiles or
aircraft. Zelenskyy did not say how many Ukraine received.
Although the
European Union is now largely off limits to most Russians, with direct flights
stopped and its land borders increasingly closed to them, an exodus of Russian
men fleeing military service is creating divisions among European officials
over whether they should be granted safe haven.
The partial
mobilization is also triggering protests in Russia, with new anti-war
demonstrations on Sunday.
In Dagestan,
one of Russia’s poorer regions in the North Caucasus, police fired warning
shots to try to disperse more than 100 people who blocked a highway while
protesting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military call-up, Russian media
reported.
Dozens of
women chanted “No to war!” in the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala on Sunday.
Videos of the protests showed women in head scarves chasing police away from
the rally and standing in front of police cars carrying detained protesters,
demanding their release.
Women also
protested in the Siberian city of Yakutsk, chanting “No to genocide!” and
marching in a circle around police, who later dragged some away or forced them
into police vans, according to videos shared by Russian media.
At least
2,000 people have been arrested in recent days for similar demonstrations
around Russia. Many of those taken away have immediately received a call-up
summons.
Unconfirmed
Russian media reports that the Kremlin might soon close Russian borders to men
of fighting age are fueling panic and prompting more to flee.
German
officials have voiced a desire to help Russian men deserting military service
and have called for a European-wide solution. Germany has held out the
possibility of granting asylum to deserters and those refusing the draft.
In France,
senators are arguing that Europe has a duty to help and warned that not granting
refuge to fleeing Russians could play into Putin’s hands, feeding his narrative
of Western hostility to Russia.
“Closing our
frontiers would fit neither with our values nor our interests,” a group of more
than 40 French senators said.
Yet other EU
countries are adamant that asylum shouldn’t be offered to Russian men fleeing
now — when the war has moved into its eighth month. They include Lithuania,
which borders Kaliningrad, a Russian Baltic Sea exclave. Its foreign minister,
Gabrielius Landsbergis, tweeted: “Russians should stay and fight. Against
Putin.”
His
counterpart in Latvia, also an EU member bordering Russia, said the exodus
poses “considerable security risks” for the 27-nation bloc and that those
fleeing now can’t be considered conscientious objectors since they did not act
when Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
Many “were
fine with killing Ukrainians, they did not protest then,” the Latvian foreign
minister, Edgars Rinkevics, tweeted. He added that they still have “plenty of
countries outside EU to go.”
Finland also
said it intends to “significantly restrict” entry to Russians entering the EU
through its border with Russia. A Finnish opposition leader, Petteri Orpo, said
fleeing Russian military reservists were an “obvious” security risk and “we
must put our national security first.”
Russia is
pressing on with its call-up of hundreds of thousands of men, seeking to
reverse recent losses. Without control of the skies over Ukraine, Russia is
also making increasing use of suicide drones from Iran, with more strikes
reported Sunday in the Black Sea port city of Odesa.
For
Ukrainian and Russian military planners, the clock is ticking, with the
approach of winter expected to make fighting much more complicated. Already,
rainy weather is bringing muddy conditions that are starting to limit the
mobility of tanks and other heavy weapons, the Washington-based Institute for
the Study of War said Sunday.
But the
think-tank said Ukrainian forces are still gaining ground in their
counteroffensive, launched in late August, that has rolled back the Russian
occupation across large areas of the northeast and which also prompted Putin’s
new drive for reinforcements.
The Kremlin
said its initial aim is to add about 300,000 troops to its invasion force,
which is struggling with equipment losses, mounting casualties and weakening
morale. The mobilization marks a sharp shift
from Putin’s
previous efforts to portray the war as a limited military operation that
wouldn’t interfere with most Russians’ lives.
The
mobilization is running hand-in-hand with Kremlin-orchestrated votes in four
occupied regions of Ukraine that could pave the way for their imminent
annexation by Russia.
Ukraine and
its Western allies say the referendums in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in
the south and the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions have no legal validity,
not least because many tens of thousands of their people have fled. They also
call them a “sham.” Some footage has shown armed Russian troops going
door-to-door to pressure Ukrainians into voting.
The voting
ends Tuesday and there’s little doubt it will be declared a success by the
Russian occupiers. The main questions then will be how soon Putin’s regime will
annex the four regions and how that will complicate the war.
AP
journalists Jari Tanner in Helsinki and John Leicester in Le Pecq, France,
contributed.
Follow the
AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine