In an interview with Ukrainian news website Obozrevatel, Tuka said Kyiv would not fight to the last Ukrainian, but “to the last Russian,” saying Ukraine should not limit itself to striking enemy targets inside its territory, but to strike on Russian soil as well. “I would very much like our American partners to stop tying us hand and foot with the demand that we not bomb the territory of Russia,” he told Obozrevatel. “In my opinion, the task of pre-emptive strikes on military installations located on the territory of both Russia and Belarus is a matter of our country’s security and not just some political terror. For a long time, both Russia and Belarus deserve to receive certain actions in return’. George Tuka, a former governor of Luhansk, said Kyiv should launch pre-emptive strikes against Russian targets on Russian soil as well as Ukrainian soil. In this photo, a man talks on the phone as he walks through debris near a Press House, a complex of printing companies, editorial offices and shops in Kharkiv that was damaged by rockets on the morning of July 31, 2022. SERGEY BOBOK/AFP via Getty Images Asked about the diplomatic risks of bombing Russian targets using weapons supplied by NATO countries, Tuka said the difference between weapons supplied by Western powers and Ukrainian weapons is “just a political trick”. “As soon as whoever and whose weapons cross the state border of Ukraine, they become Ukrainians. Who we bought them from, how we got them – it doesn’t matter. This is political manipulation and nothing more,” he said. Since the start of the conflict on February 24, NATO has condemned “in the strongest terms Russia’s brutal and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine” but has avoided open conflict with Moscow, keen to avoid expanding the battlefield to NATO territory. Tuka, who was deputy minister for temporarily occupied territories and internally displaced people in then-Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman’s government between 2016 and 2019, said more than HIMARS was needed to achieve “a real revolution” against Russian troops. He called for “the provision of automotive equipment, armored vehicles, means of communication and modern night vision devices” as well as “long-range missiles” to “open up new opportunities” for Ukrainian troops. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Russian forces are said to have resumed local ground offensives northwest and southwest of Izyum, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which said Moscow’s troops may also be preparing to offensive operations further west in the Kharkiv region. or to the city of Kharkiv. Russian troops currently occupy about 60 percent of Donetsk, and Moscow is expected to continue its offensive in the region to eventually annex the entire territory if it wins. President Volodymyr Zelensky urged citizens to evacuate eastern Donetsk and leave the battlefield, saying “the more people leave the Donetsk region now, the fewer people the Russian army will have to kill.” A mandatory evacuation notice was posted Saturday night, asking families to remove tens of thousands of children from the area before winter. “They must be evacuated, you cannot put them in mortal danger in the winter without heating, light, without the ability to keep them warm,” Kyiv’s Ministry of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories said in a statement.
