DNIPRO, Ukraine—A U.S. 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 dour 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 nearest 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 itself against a brutal invasion.
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.
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“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 Kremlin is getting increasingly irritated with every shipment of arms reaching Ukraine from the U.S. Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has gone so far as to warn 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 north Kyiv region.
Gleb Garanich/ReutersBut 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 U.S. was providing enough aid to his country. “The help that the United States gives us is laughable,” he said. “The U.S. 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 U.S. 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 artillery with their missiles.”
Servicemen carry a coffin during the funeral ceremony of Yuriy Dadak-Ruf and Taras Kryt in Lviv on April 9.
Viacheslav Ratynskyi/ReutersRussia appears to have changed its war strategy as of late, with fewer reports emerging about destroyed Russian tanks or dead Russian soldiers. Some of the images Herashchenko showed The Daily Beast on his cellphone are terrifying, including a photo of one injured Ukrainian man with nothing left of his face but one ear. “He is alive,” Herashchenko said. Another picture shows a man with his belly slashed and his organs visible.
“My friend wrote to me the other day: ‘Give us tanks and we’ll throw the Russian military out of Ukraine,’” said Herashchenko. “It’s impossible to count the number of airstrikes on Donbas and the Kharkiv region.”
Meanwhile in Kyiv, peaceful life has returned, at least for now, though many citizens in the capital worry for the fate of countless fellow Ukrainians still living under constant bombardment in other parts of the country. That includes 62-year-old engineer Iryna Morgunova, whose grandparents lived in Kyiv during the Nazi occupation. Like all wars, she said, she is still holding out hope that this one will eventually end—and that her country and people will persevere.
“My mother told me that Germans hung people right here on the Maidan square,” Morgunova told The Daily Beast. “And then, after the war was over, the occupants were executed on the same spot.”
