Its enemy: time-operated Katyusha tubes on the ground or small Toyota trucks equipped with Katyusha launchers The main enemy is the 21

Its enemy: time-operated Katyusha tubes on the ground or small Toyota trucks equipped with Katyusha launchers The main enemy is the 21.5km-range Grad Katyusha. The artillery can locate the Katyusha as it is being launched and give precise targeting location for it within seconds.”Israeli planning drew on the experience of the Gulf war in 1991, but with an exaggerated respect for high-technology weapons. “It entered the picture on Friday [the first day of sustained bombardment]. When that failed, they began to lash out in all directions.”The rhetoric of the offensive changed after the first four euphoric days as the rockets kept landing. Briefing officers stopped speaking of surgical strikes and the fading ability of Hizbollah to launch the Katyushas. The initial mood, and the army’s belief in the accuracy of its new heavy artillery, was well caught by a lyrical description of the Dohar 155mm gun by Alex Fishman, correspondent of the daily Yediot Aharanot “The Dohar is the rising star,” he wrote. It was to be a clinical war, with no television film of dead children and grieving parents to stoke international outrage.
“The army offered Peres a seductive cocktail,” says one diplomat.

“They believed they had weapons so accurate they could hit a Hizbollah leader in his bath. At the start of Operation Grapes of Wrath the army made Shimon Peres, the Israeli Prime Minister, two promises: it said it could largely eliminate the ability of Hizbollah to fire Katyushas across the border and, with its new “smart” guided bombs and missiles, it could do so without inflicting massive casualties on Lebanese civilians. One historian, Viktor Kirkevich, has gone so far as to suggest that communism was a Russian import imposed on Kiev: “A great number of outstanding people were born in Kiev, but not a single leader of the Bolshevik party, and not a single representative of the organs of repression.”Just to drive the point home, the authorities have renamed dozens of Kiev’s roads, parks and metro stations. Lenin Street now bears the name of Bohdan Khmelnitsky, a 17th-century Ukrainian national hero.. Two minutes before the ceasefire began at 4am yesterday, a Katyusha crashed into an apartment building in Kiryat Shmona, the town in northern Israel which is a favourite target for the Hizbollah guerillas who fire rockets.

It caused no casualties, but the explosion marked the failure of the Israeli army to achieve its goals in its 17-day-long bombardment of Lebanon. The heartland of the Ukrainian national identity is western Ukraine, in places such as Lviv (once a very Polish city, known as Lwow), but overall about 40 per cent of Ukraine’s 52 million people use Russian as their first language.The identity of Kiev, or Kyiv in Ukrainian, is a particularly difficult matter to sort out. Many prominent Russians, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, author of the classic novel The Master and Margarita, were born in Kiev.Yet it is now the capital of an independent Ukrainian state, and many public figures and writers feel it their duty to stress the city’s non- Russian identity. As the centre of the first Russian state, which emerged in the ninth century, Kiev occupies an important place in the Russian national consciousness. True, during evening hours, finding one can mean a bit of a wait. But even with the recent fare increase, the yellow cabs are one of the best bargains in town. The average fare is set to rise to $6.60, compared to pounds 5 or $7.70 for a black cab in London.