Ukraine isn’t willing to surrender territory just for the sake of saving another half-million Russian soldiers being turned into “fertilizer for our fields”, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky broadcast a 20-minute address to the nation on Monday, talking up Ukrainian strength and defiance in the face of the ongoing Russian invasion as the nation marked the 35th anniversary of its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. While much of the speech focussed on the determination of the Ukrainian people — the President quipped that the love and spirit of Ukraine makes the nation “100 times stronger than Russian and 100 time stronger than all their tanks on parade” — the message also challenged President Putin directly.
“Putin made a big mistake” in invading Ukraine, he said, stating the Ukrainian army is now “the strongest in Europe, period” and backed by its “giant” defence industry. At sea, the Russian fleet is being transformed into “scrap metal” and on land, drones deliver “Ukrainian justice” to hinterland areas, he said.
Russia is attempting to “deceive” Europe and the U.S. into believing that if Ukraine surrenders the Donbas then the war will end quickly, Zelensky said. But Ukraine will not give up its land just for the sake of saving “the Kremlin half a million soldiers”, the Ukrainian President went on, graphically explaining how the Kremlin has “lost an entire generation, which you pushed into the meat grinder” while the Ukrainian army “turns the reinforcement of the Russian army into fertilizer for our fields”.
President Zelensky’s reference to half a million more Russian soldiers due to face the “meat grinder” if the Kremlin continues to pursue the invasion of Ukraine is likely a reference to recently published assessments of total combat casualties in the Ukraine war to date. As reported in July, a study by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said it had found two million casualties across both sides in the four-and-a-half years since the beginning of the full invasion in 2022.
Of those two million, the lion’s share at 1.4 million are reckoned to be Russian combat casualties. Of those, around 400,000 back in July were said to be Russian war dead, with the remaining million-or-so wounded and missing. As stated, the scale of casualties makes the Russian invasion of Ukraine the largest conflict for any world power since the Second World War, and Russian casualties are so great they are higher than the combined Russian casualties for every post-1945 conflict, soaring well beyond even wars like Afghanistan.