Ukraine’s military intelligence chief says Russia will try to divide Ukraine into two separate regions as the Russian advance on Kyiv stalls.


A man walks past a school that was damaged by fighting in Kharkiv, Ukraine [Thomas Peter/Reuters]
Published On 27 Mar 2022
27 Mar 2022
Russia is considering “a Korean scenario” for Ukraine and splitting the country in two after failing to seize the capital Kyiv and overthrow its government, the Ukrainian military intelligence chief has said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “will try to impose a dividing line between the unoccupied and occupied regions of our country”, General Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Ministry of Defence’s Intelligence Directorate, said on Sunday as reported by the ministry’s Telegram account.

“It is an attempt to create North and South Korea in Ukraine. After all, he is definitely not in a position to swallow the whole country,” Budanov said.

The two Koreas are still technically at war after a 1950-53 conflict ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, sealing the division of their peninsula with an impenetrable border. Their border is a 4km (2.4-mile) wide by 248km (154-mile) long area known as the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ).

After more than four weeks of conflict, Russia has failed to seize any major Ukrainian city, and Moscow signalled on Friday that it was scaling back its ambitions to focus on securing the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainian army for the past eight years.

INTERACTIVE Russia Ukraine War Who controls what Day 32
(Al Jazeera)
“The occupiers will try to unite the occupied territories into a single quasi-state entity, which will oppose independent Ukraine,” said Budanov, the intelligence chief. “We are already seeing attempts to create ‘parallel’ authorities in the occupied territories and force people to give up the Ukrainian currency.”

A local leader in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic said the region could soon hold a referendum on joining Russia, just as happened in Crimea after Russia seized the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014.

Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine and join Russia – a vote that much of the world refused to recognise.

And the war will still continue just like North and South Korea.

Poland already did
Poland state TV posted this 3 days ago

recognized only by Russia