People change – Ukraine stays the same...

July 21 – President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed the Commander‑in‑Chief of the Ukrainian army, Oleksandr Syrskyi, and appointed 43‑year‑old Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi as his successor. This followed several days of clearly Western‑sponsored protests in several Ukrainian cities: on July 17, Zelensky had dismissed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, which displeased NATO and the EU.

With Drapatyi, the leadership of the armed forces has been taken over by an extreme Russophobic and nationalist hero of the Banderite movement in Kyiv and their Western propagandists. For example, in the taz (Die Tageszeitung), Barbara Ertel praised him as an "excellent man": "On May 9, 2014, he organized a breakthrough of Ukrainian troops into the centre of Mariupol, which at that time was held by pro‑Russian militants. Video footage shows Drapatyi's armoured personnel carriers ramming through a barricade in the middle of the street. As Drapatyi later recalled in an interview with Armija FM radio, this video went viral worldwide." The fact is that the residents of Mariupol, who had been protesting against the Kyiv putschists for weeks, celebrated Victory Day in 2014 as usual. The day ended in a bloodbath: the putschists' tanks rolled into the city and opened indiscriminate fire on civilians, as video evidence shows. How many people were killed by the thugs led by the "excellent man" Drapatyi was never clarified by Kyiv's justice system – just as the massacre at the Trade Unions House in Odesa on May 2, 2014, remains unclarified. Both events, and especially the tank assault on Mariupol, marked the beginning of the war – a brutal campaign against the Russian‑speaking population living there. But since those people belonged to the ethnic tribe of "pro‑Russians," which had been discovered shortly before by the German bourgeois press, the West at the time showed no interest in the killings.

That is now being rectified. For instance, in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), Stefan Locke, finally, after Drapatyi's appointment on July 27, again saw a victory over Russia: "Russian military bloggers, who had not without reason welcomed Fedorov's dismissal, panicked at Drapatyi's appointment. But together, Drapatyi and Fedorov could bring Ukraine's defence to an entirely new level and put Russia in a pincer movement in such a way that – and this is what it's all about – Putin would finally be ready for negotiations." There seems to be something more at play among NATO's godfathers: to put an end to this with Fedorov's reintegration into the Kyiv clique.

In Russia, shortly after Drapatyi's appointment, a video interview with him from 2023 caused outrage, in which he called the Russian people "a nation that has no right to exist." Furthermore, he described the residents of Donbas as "a group that does not want to work and does not care which country they live in." According to him, these are "immigrants and criminal elements." In his view, they wanted "not to work, but simply to live at the expense of others." That is why they are so "uninformed." He said that too little attention had been paid to their "Ukrainisation."

Now the nationalist fanatic is doing this by military means. Since, contrary to all victory reports, there had been no successes on the battlefield, under his command Russian civilians immediately became targets of massive attacks. As early as the night of July 25, the Ukrainian armed forces used numerous drones to strike holiday resorts in Kyrylivka on the Sea of Azov. As a result, twelve people were killed and 19 civilians, including children, were wounded. Russia's Investigative Committee opened a criminal case on terrorism charges.

On Monday, Russian Foreign Ministry special representative Rodion Miroshkin told TASS about the results of this change in strategy: over the previous week, 21 minors had been wounded and seven children had been killed. Thus, for the first time since 2022, nearly 500 people in Russia were wounded in Ukrainian attacks within a week, 91 percent from drone strikes, and 57 people died. The highest number of casualties was in the border region of Belgorod, as well as in the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics. At the same time, Kyiv is "deliberately attacking medical facilities and ambulances" and using drones to lay mines targeting people.

This continued on Tuesday. In the border town of Shebekino, a drone hit a public bus, wounding 19 people, six of them seriously. Five people were wounded in a second drone strike on a bus near Donetsk. Drapatyi is taking "Ukrainisation" seriously.