(Special Envoy to Ukraine). This Thursday at 17.10 PM, as a fine drizzle fell intermittently, alarm sirens began to sound in Lviv, a city near the Polish border that could become a fixed target for Vladimir Putin in the coming weeks. Lviv is a delivery point for weapons and humanitarian aid sent by the United States and certain countries of the European Union, and Russia is already targeting this city that would be key to sustaining the war rhythm of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Last Sunday, five missiles fell on the outskirts of Lviv to destroy a handful of military sheds housing aid to supply Ukrainian troops. This military and humanitarian collaboration ordered by the White House and certain European countries will multiply its assiduity and volume. A strategic move aimed at curbing the offensive being prepared by the Kremlin from east to west of Ukraine.
From this perspective, Lviv is preparing to face a massive rocket attack that Moscow would deploy on the city to destroy military equipment and humanitarian supplies that will be sent by Joe Biden, Pedro Sanchez and Boris Johnson, among other global leaders.
If the Pentagon does not change its plans, in the next few hours, 72 155mm howitzers, 72 tactical vehicles to tow those shells to the battlefield and more than 100 Phoenix Ghost tactical drones would arrive in Ukraine in the next few hours.
At 20.08 PM, alarms went off again in Lviv. It was a tense situation that lasted 60 minutes, while the city was emptied by tension, rain and the eventual tragedy caused by Russian rockets. People were walking fast, looking up at the sky and dodging the puddles.
The military authorities in Lviv assume that - if there is a plan of attack prepared by Putin - it will be by air. The avenues of the city, its exquisite boulevard, or the entrances to historical sites, lack ground defense. There are no sandbags, no detents mounted with twisted irons, machine guns and mobile equipment covering the flanks.
The absence of this defense tactic implies two possible circumstances: Moscow aims to destroy with its missiles the warehouses with the equipment sent by Washington and Europe, and if there is a ground offensive by the Russian Army, nothing could be done anymore. From the east, Lviv is the last major city heading to Poland.
The curfew in Lviv starts at 23 PM. Until that time there are a handful of restaurants that remain open, and last night the obligatory comment was the complex situation in Mariupol. This city in the east fell into the hands of the Kremlin and marks a turning point in the offensive of the Russian army.
Putin needed a victory to hide his strategic mistakes, and the fall of Mariupol became his main input for psychological action within the Russian Federation. From that port city, Moscow can feed its official propaganda system and consolidate its plan to divide Ukraine in the face of the war impossibility of reaching Kyiv.
But the future psychological action of the Kremlin will have an underlying problem. The unofficial information coming from Mariupol says that Putin's troops committed genocide in that city, and that there are records of mass graves opened to bury unnamed civilian victims of the illegal war.
At 11 PM, the curfew began. There was no one left on the streets of Lviv. Everything was dark, the last cars escaped along Svobody Avenue, and the rain fell sticky on a city that will once again sleep restlessly.
KEEP READING: