Dnipro, Ukraine—A US flag hangs in the city hall of Dnipro, Ukraine’s stronghold in the east. The deputy mayor, Mykhailo Lysenko, sits in his office and strokes his nervous ginger cat, which he has named Biden. Lysenko’s face is door and serious—for good reason.
The situation on the city’s frontlines has been deteriorating quickly, Lysenko told The Daily Beast in an interview on Monday. His country is facing yet another bloodbath, with Russian forces steadily advancing towards eastern cities like Dnipro, a sure-fire sign that Vladimir Putin’s senseless war is far from over. The frontline from Dnipro is less than 100 miles away, and the risk of Russian missiles striking from any direction looms. There’s a basis for Lysenko’s fixation with the United States: his country’s dependence on America for arms to defend himself against a brutal invasion.
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Monday was a particularly bloody day in Ukraine. Russian missiles destroyed a railway station in the western city of Lviv and a power plant in Poltava region. After heavy shelling, occupying forces took over the village of Novotoshkovskoye in Luhansk on Monday, leaving “no houses” standing. Every day, Lysenko visits wounded Ukrainian soldiers brought to Dnipro from all over the frontlines. More than 1,500 of them are now sitting in local hospitals.
“The [Russian offensive] is approaching. Our city is a fortress with four rings of defense. But we need more help from the United States to defend the region: tanks, jets, drones, howitzers,” Lysenko told The Daily Beast.
The threat of the war spiraling into even more chaos grows more imminent as the remlin is getting increasingly Kirritated with every shipment of arms reaching Ukraine from the US Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has gone so far as the West of the “threat of a nuclear war,” and says that NATO is now Russia’s direct target for supplying weapons to Kyiv.
A Ukrainian service member holds a Javelin missile system at a position on the front line in the northern Kyiv region.
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A Ukrainian service member holds a Javelin missile system at a position on the front line in the northern Kyiv region.
Gleb Garanich/Reuters
But Ukraine insists it needs these shipments from Washington—now more than ever—and its government is under no illusions about Russia’s vastly greater resources and manpower.
“We are fighting against an overwhelmingly superior enemy in numbers of soldiers, modern military equipment and weapons. We win battles only thanks to our soldiers’ courage and the bravery of our president. But we are badly lacking weapons to defend Ukraine,” Anton Herashchenko, Ukraine’s advisor for the interior minister, told The Daily Beast in an interview on Saturday.
Herashchenko was very direct about whether he thought the US was providing enough aid to his country. “The help that the United States gives us is laughable,” he said. “The US gave Great Britain the equivalent of… $190 billion [to the Soviet Union during WWII]. That was the aid that allowed victory in the war against Hitler. But if the US supplied the USSR with as much aid as they give us now ($3.4 billion since the beginning of the Russian invasion), Hitler would have occupied both Britain and the USSR, created nuclear weapons, and attacked the United States. If Biden was like Franklin Roosevelt, there would be peace in the world.”
Herashchenko continued: “Putin’s goal is clear, to occupy Luhansk and Donetsk regions, but you need to understand the final plan: Putin does not want Ukraine to exist. The only power that can stop them is the power of weapons, nothing else… We have a ton of motivated men and women to fight…[but] Every day, Russians destroy our tanks and our guns with their missiles.”
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