Our Aid Is Vital Now As Ukraine Drives Back The Russians

THE barbaric onslaught against Ukraine is faltering. The invader is in retreat.

- Leo McKinstry

Shocked by the strength of resistance, undermined by their own blunders, the Russians are unable to hold the territory they captured at the end of February. In many places the Ukrainian flag is flying high once more.

Vladimir Putin had thought he would have an easy conquest of his neighbour.

At his disposal were 900,000 troops, 3,000 tanks and 5,000 artillery pieces, compared to Ukraine's army of just 190,000 soldiers, 860 tanks and 2,000 guns. Putin planned to overrun the nation in a few days, overthrow the government of Volodymyr Zelensky and install a puppet regime. But the illusions of subjugation are now as ruined as the burnt-out Russian tanks littering the roads to Kyiv.

His adventure has turned into a miserable, blood-soaked failure, at great human cost.

As the Russians withdraw from large swathes of northern Ukraine, they leave behind mounting evidence of their inhumanity as well as their ineptitude. In the town of Bucha, which became a graveyard for the Kremlin's hopes of capturing Kyiv, reporters have seen corpses of murdered civilians in the streets, their hands tied behind their backs.

ACCORDING to Anatoly Fedoruk, the town's mayor, at least 270 people have been buried there in mass graves, which would make this the darkest massacre in Europe since Srebrenica during the Bosnian War.