Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his daily address Saturday that Russia “has become a synonym for terror and will be an example of defeat and fair punishment for this terror.”
Zelenskyy said Russian shelling Saturday “took the lives of people in Kherson who simply went to a store to buy groceries. Three Ukrainians died.”
A sanctioning decree has been published, Zelenskyy said, with more than 280 companies and 120 people “who, through gambling business schemes, worked against Ukraine, withdrew funds from our state and financed various Russian schemes.”
The British Defense Ministry said Sunday in its intelligence update on Ukraine that Russia is suffering “extremely heavy casualties,” but their impact is not being felt in the richest cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Instead, the report said, the death rate as a percentage of the population in the Eastern regions is “30-40 times higher than in Moscow.”
Ethnic minorities are taking the biggest hit, according to the ministry. In the southern Astrakhan region, about 75% of the casualties are among minority Kazakhs and Tartars.
According to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the mounting casualties for Russia are having an impact in Moscow and are reflected in a loss of government control over the country’s information sphere. The think tank said that Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova confirmed “infighting in the Kremlin inner circle.” Due to that strife the Kremlin has effectively ceded control over the country’s information space. Russia President Vladimir Putin has been unable to readily regain control of it, said the ISW.
The British ministry said that while Russia continues to look for ways to increase its combat personnel, that “insulating the better-off and more influential elements of Russian society will highly likely remain a major consideration.”
