Ukraine, 100 days of a war with no end in sight

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. It has been 100 days since that attack that most of the world did not consider imaginable in the heart of Europe. 100 days have passed and there is no end to what Moscow thought was supposed to be a blitzkrieg, indeed a special military operation as the Kremlin has always called it to denazify Ukraine. From the offensive on several fronts (North, East, South), the war is now concentrated on the pro-Russian regions of Donbass and the neighboring areas and areas of connection with the Crimea occupied in 2014. According to NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, that in Ukraine will be a war long-term.\

That it could not be what Putin hoped was immediately clear: Ukraine has opposed and is resisting supported by Western weapons and sanctions against Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky he refused to leave the country and guided it by staying in Kiev and making speeches and messages everywhere: from the Cannes festival to the UN, passing through the parliaments of Europe and the world.

Fromsinking of the Moskva to the resistance on the island of snakes, from the Bucha massacres to the destruction of Mariupol, the symbolic city of this war. According to experts, the Russians did not expect an adversary prepared thanks to Western intelligence.

There are cities razed to the ground, hospitals bombed, civilians killed and executed, corn stuck in ports and the risk of a world food crisis. There are countries like Sweden and Finland who expressed their willingness to join NATO, the EU sent weapons to a country for the first time, the whole world took to the streets against the war in the first weeks. There is the victory of Ukraine with the popular vote at Eurovision. There is the national team fighting to get to the World Cup.

From Bucha the images of the mass graves arrive: the dead could be at least 500 here. 600, according to an investigation by Associated Press, only in the Russian bombing of the Mariupol theater on March 16. These are only the most well-known episodes of a war that counts a hundred victims a day. According to President Zelensky, 20% of the Ukrainian territory is in Russian hands.

The World Bank says the country’s poverty rate in 2022 could reach 70%. According to the United Nations there are eight million internally displaced people and six million people who fled abroad: most women and children. In Italy there are officially 116 thousand people.

In the gallery some of the images of 100 days of war.