“Russia wages total war against Ukraine,” said Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst and research fellow at the Ukrainian National Institute for Strategic Studies.
“The goal of such total war is to force civilians to create pressure on the Ukrainian authorities to negotiate settlement on Russia’s terms. So far, Russians failed, but they believe there’s a tipping point beyond which civilians will begin to direct their hatred not at the Russian Federation, but at our government,” he added.
It’s a tactic that countries have used against each other since the advent to air warfare in the 20th century, but there are few if any examples of terror bombing being effective in getting civilians to rebel against their government; usually, the response to such attacks is the opposite.
Blaming their own
However, the Russian attacks are highlighting strains in Ukrainian society as the war drags into its fourth year.
After the attack on Sumy, Mariana Bezuhla, an opposition MP, accused the Ukrainian military of endangering civilians by holding an award ceremony for soldiers in Sumy despite knowing about the upcoming Russian attack. The soldiers were unharmed as they were in a shelter.
Artem Semenikhin, mayor of the Konotop, a town in the Sumy region, accused the local governor of planning a ceremony for a local military brigade. He added that by doing so, the governor helped Russia justify “a genocidal attack on us, Ukrainians.”
