Russia has deployed forces to Ukrainian hospitals and schools to use the civilians as “human shields” from an expected counteroffensive, according to Ukrainian officials.
“The adversary continues to use educational institutions of the temporarily occupied territories, having them re-purposed as military facilities, hiding behind a human shield of schoolchildren and the teaching staff,” the Ukrainian General Staff asserted in a Friday evening update.
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Ukrainian officials are preparing for a major effort to reclaim some of the southern and eastern Ukrainian territory seized when Russian troops poured out of Crimea and the occupied regions of Donbas last February. Yet Russian forces have worked to fortify their positions across southern and eastern Ukraine while clinging to a massive nuclear power plant near the front lines, and the campaign to drive them back could be fraught with practical and moral hazards.
“For example, Russian occupation troops are stationed in the building of a local school in the settlement of Lubyanka (Luhansk oblast),” the general staff said. “The personnel is stationed in the buildings of educational institutions, as they force the teaching staff to continue the educational process, with the attendance of children and teaching staff being mandatory.”
The strike could deliver the first substantial advance of Ukrainian troops since the fall counteroffensive spurred Russia to withdraw from key territories and begin to mobilize conscripts. Ukrainian forces are expected to attempt to break through the so-called land bridge linking Russian forces in the southern peninsula of Crimea to Donbas and mainland Russia further north, though recently leaked U.S. intelligence assessments cast doubt on the likely extent of their success.
“The counteroffensive should not be considered a decisive battle,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Friday. “If one counteroffensive will be needed, there will be one. If we will need two or more, it will be so. This is not a conflict that can be frozen.”
The exact path of the impending counteroffensive is a closely guarded secret — “no more than five people” have access to the battle plans, a senior adviser to Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksii Danilov said on April 6 — but Russian officials have added new fortifications around Zaporizhzhia, a partially occupied region north of Crimea and Kherson but south of Donbas.
“The Russian assessment appears to be that the Ukrainians’ most likely and most dangerous place to attack is in the south, particularly in Zaporizhzhia,” retired Australian Army Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan told Reuters this week.
That’s an anxious prospect for international observers due to Russia’s occupation of a Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. U.N. nuclear experts at the plant “were again forced to shelter this week after missile attack warnings,” according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“In addition, one landmine exploded near the site,” the IAEA added.
The Biden administration has accused Russia of militarizing the power plant while using the threat of a nuclear disaster to deter Ukrainian counterattacks. “That brings the notion of having a human shield to an entirely different and horrific level,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last year.
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The new military updates suggest that more conventional versions of that dilemma are strewn across the occupied territory.
“The occupiers re-purposed the local hospital in Kalanchak (Kherson oblast) into a military hospital, where a large number of gravely wounded Russians were brought to on April 27,” the general staff said. “The enemy used a KAMAZ-based medical truck to transport the casualties.”
