Sanctions won’t stop Russian aggression, says Ukraine’s former security chief

Facing the eighth day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, former Ukrainian security chief Oleksandr Danylyuk said in an interview with CNN International on Thursday (3) that economic sanctions on Russia “are very important, but they will not prevent aggression”.

The military man considered that “it is not that they should not be applied”, but that they should be imposed immediately and even then they will not have a concrete effect for Russian troops to end the conflict.

Danylyuk argued that the most effective measure at the moment would be to receive more weapons from the West. “Actually, what would help would be getting more weapons from the West. We need the West to not only empathize with us, but also to act as if they were a part of us,” he said.

According to the former security chief, many Ukrainians will have to pay a high price with their lives for the country to win the war. He even said he was “ready to fight” and reinforced that he was very proud to be Ukrainian. “I am very proud to see people who are fighting me that I have never seen before.”

The military, however, said that many Russian soldiers are being killed in Ukraine and that, for this reason, the population of Russia is “afraid that their children will be recruited, because they know that they will be killed here”.

Danylyuk also said that Russian troops are in captivity within Ukrainian territory, and that they often arrived in the country without knowing that they would be on the front lines of the armed confrontation.

“Their morale is being affected, so I think it would be more difficult for Russia to mobilize more forces,” he said.

According to Ukraine’s former security chief, Russia must declare martial law to try to mobilize more troops.