“General Winter” enters the battlefield in Ukraine – perhaps he will finally decide victory and defeat in this troublesome war. Kremlin ruler Vladimir Putin (70) believes that with his nefarious rocket attacks on civilian power plants and heating systems he brings the attacked to their knees: Cold apartments and dark streets are already making Ukrainians think, according to the calculation of this terror strategy . However, the protagonist responsible for the costliest wrong decisions in modern Russian history is also wrong here.
But one after the other.
Historically, it was mainly the attacking side that faltered with the onset of winter. During his Russian campaign in December 1812, the French general Napoleon lost entire armies in the snowy plains. And Adolf Hitler’s 6th Army was literally wiped out by the harsh winter of 1942/1943 outside Stalingrad.
The ill-equipped hordes Putin sent to attack the neighboring country to the west are unlikely to fare any better. Unlike the defenders, the Russian soldiers do not have Nato sleeping bags, with which they can survive the bitterly cold nights in the Donbass (often minus 30 degrees) unscathed.
300,000 refugees by the onset of winter
Putin doesn’t care about his frigid frontline fighters as long as his missiles cut off entire cities from the power grid and millions of Ukrainians take away not only electricity, mobile phone communications and light, but also drinking water and heating. Anyone who has ever experienced a Ukrainian winter knows how relentlessly the frost rages across the flatlands between November and February. In February 2021, shortly before the outbreak of war, I suddenly found myself alone on the military training ground south of Kiev because my translator Olena, despite wearing a winter coat and gloves, could no longer stand the freezing cold.
Putin is counting on the dwindling morale of the trembling citizens of Ukraine. At first glance with success. Even if the Ministry of Defense in Kiev still distributes funny videos of soldiers enjoying snowstorms on social networks, and even if people tell the joke that it will take at least 3,000 Russian missile strikes on Kiev before the standard of living there reaches the level of Russia’s sinking : the situation just before the onset of winter is serious.
Kirill Dolimbaev, 45, a former tax collector in Mariupol and now head of one of the largest Ukrainian aid organizations, said in an interview with SonntagsBlick: “Ukraine is threatened with a humanitarian catastrophe this winter. More than 300,000 people could be forced to flee and leave the country.”
Deaths despite heated war apartments
Eva Samoylenko-Niederer (40), from Wädenswil, who ran a children’s home in the Donbass city of Sloviansk until the Russian attack and today provides humanitarian aid in the war zone with her association Segel der Hoffnung, tells SonntagsBlick: “Ukrainians are against the hard battle winter. But especially many older people will wake up one morning and say to themselves: I just don’t like it anymore, I’m not getting up now to get new wood. Many of these people will not be found until next spring – dead.”
Many are beginning to see the seriousness of the situation. “Many cities in the war zone will be uninhabitable in the winter months,” says Samoylenko-Niederer. For example, in the city of Slowyansk, only selected houses are heated in which the stragglers of several households live together in a kind of war flat. “Still, people will freeze to death, just like in the 2014/2015 war. There won’t be enough resources to save everyone.”
Partygoers will be awakened
Much stronger than the tragic individual fate will be the wake-up effect that Putin’s rocket terror has in the pre-winter cities away from the actual front. Especially in the metropolitan cities of Kiev, Lviv and Dnipro, where life was largely normal in summer and autumn – including techno parties, shopping festivals and full gourmet restaurants – persistent power and heating failures suddenly make people feel: Damn, that’s what War is for my door!
As winter sets in, Putin’s forces need not fear only the Ukrainian tank fleets rolling across the now icy mudfields of the Donbass towards weakened Russian positions. Above all, they can expect a new wave of solidarity in the country, which will give additional support to the warmly wrapped Ukrainian soldiers.
“General Winter” will probably again side with the attacked in this war.