“Every effort is being made to avoid civilian casualties. It certainly slows down the advance,” Shoigu said at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on Wednesday, according to TASS. “But we do it on purpose.” Russian forces, however, have been hitting Ukrainian civilians since the start of the war, which on Wednesday reached the end of six months. In the early days of the war, Russia struck a maternity hospital, killing at least one mother and one baby. Since then, Russia has hit playgrounds, theaters with a clear indication that they protect children, office and apartment buildings, a shopping mall. Moscow has repeatedly denied it was behind the attacks, instead claiming they were “fake news” or that the people who died in the attacks were agents of the crisis. Russia even tried to pin the blame on the Ukrainians and accused them of attacking their own people. Shoigu’s bogus attempt to explain away Russia’s failures in the war in Ukraine comes after a series of disturbing news cycles about Russia, with a spate of explosions and attacks that damaged a Russian air base in Crimea and a key supply bridge. According to a senior US defense official, they come as the war has entered a new phase where Russia really isn’t making much progress. “Right now, I would say you see a complete and utter lack of progress by the Russians on the battlefield,” the senior US defense official told reporters at a briefing last week. “We are in a different phase than we were a few months ago.” Shoigu’s comments about eliminating problems on Russia’s battlefield also come ahead of an expected counteroffensive against Kherson, which Russia captured early in the war. There are many other answers as to why the Russian military might have problems with war other than the lie that it is trying to avoid killing civilians. The Russian military has had problems from the start and has yet to achieve its main objectives. Russian forces faced logistical, planning and fuel problems as they tried to capture the capital, Kyiv, in the early days of the war. Russian troops waited in a roughly 40-mile column outside Kyiv, halting for a week, before withdrawing and resigning to regroup and deploy elsewhere in Ukraine. “Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine six months ago, aiming to overthrow the government and take over most of the country. By April, Russia’s leaders realized that this had failed and returned to more moderate targets in eastern and southern Ukraine,” said a British intelligence assessment released on Wednesday. And even in rebuilding to the east, efforts to seize ground have made only “minimal” progress, according to the assessment. To make matters worse, morale is dragging among Russian forces and shortages of ammunition, vehicles and personnel abound, according to the intelligence assessment. Some of Russia’s obstacles can be attributed to its issues with distributing resources and anticipating the needs of combatants in advance, according to the Institute for the Study of War. “Russian forces had probably exhausted their momentum from territorial gains around Avdiivka and Bakhmut in Donetsk – a very small part of the entire Ukrainian theater – in part due to their inability to devote sufficient resources to offensive operations,” the statement said. institute on Tuesday. In other cases, Russian leaders have resorted to intimidation and threats to try to persuade soldiers to fight, according to British intelligence. Forces in Luhansk have expressed an increased unwillingness to fight in offensive operations in recent days despite these threats, which could be a sign of how desperate Russia is to pick up the pace.
