It has now been one hundred
days since Russian tanks rolled across the border and into neighbouring Ukraine
on February 24, 2022.
A torrent of gut-wrenching
images and clips have emerged since that fateful day: Civilian corpses in the
streets of Bucha; a blown-up theatre in Mariupol; the chaos at a
Kramatorsk train station in the wake of a Russian missile strike, to name a
few.
More than 100,000 Russian
troops massed on Ukraine’s borders in the days leading up to February 24, but
many analysts and commentators dismissed the notion that Russia would
launch a full-scale invasion into its European neighbour.
Those who did predict such a
conflict warned Putin’s troops, superior in numbers and equipment, would sweep
to victory in a matter of days.
More than three months later
and Ukraine’s armed forces, driven by a duty to protect their homeland and
reinforced by Western supplies and weaponry, have successfully repelled
Russia’s soldiers from Kyiv and are still fighting their invaders fiercely
throughout the Donbas.
Russian state media, which
from the beginning portrayed the conflict as a ‘special military operation’
designed to ‘demilitarize and de-nazify’ Ukraine, was asked by Putin’s administration
ahead of the 100th day of war ‘not to propagate the theme of the operation’ and
‘not to draw attention to its duration’, multiple sources told Russian-Latvian
news organization Meduza.
