my second interlocutor today is maria zolkina , an analyst at the democratic initiatives foundation named. maria, congratulations . thank you very much for joining today's program. i am waiting for your professional answers that will allow me to understand the questions that for me personally and for my viewers sometimes seem difficult to understand. i already have some with mr. mykola spoke about the referendums that took place, the so-called referendums that took place in the territories that russia now considers its so-called own . ms. maria please tell me what we need to prepare for, what we need to wait for. in the coming weeks, maybe months, it is obvious that this will be a victorious advance of the armed forces of ukraine, but what else we need to wait after that. well, we have to understand that russia has actually used all its diplomatic, economic, military, and blackmail methods not only of ukraine in order to force ukraine to cooperate with russia, but also the tools with which it could pressure the west, and therefore, in fact, russia only had the only argument on which they

. >> for more on this, we're joined by maria zolkina, the head of regional security and conflict studiesmocratic initiative foundation in kyiv and she's joining us from warsaw, poland. thank you for being here with us. just to start, we spoke to ukraine's deputy minister of digital transformation who said how important starlink is, saying you have to be online. take us through that in more detail, why is it so crucial to ukraine right now? >> it is crucial actually because ukraine didn't have and doesn't have right now its own satellite and we don't have the specific technical system for ukraine itself to support all the equipment to be online, interconnected, because especially right now when ukraine is using sophisticated weapons, almost all of them are actually digitalized in terms of targeting, in terms of everything and moreover ukrainian army divisions, they should be interconnected, one with another, because one is defining what is going on in one part of the front line and the other one can -- the front. it is not only military, but also logistical issue for ukraine and taking in