The Atrocities In Ukraine Are No Aberration, But the Way Russia Wages War

The Russian army has a long history of using terror to intimidate their opponents. 

The problem, aside from being morally repugnant and reputationally deleterious, is that, as in Afghanistan and Ukraine, it often doesnt work. JL 

Max Boot reports in the Washington Post, image Evgeniy Maloletka, AP:

The atrocities in Bucha were no aberration. There is ample evidence of other war crimes by Russian troops. It is how Putin’s forces fought in Chechnya and Syria and before that, how Soviet forces fought in Afghanistan and in central Europe during World War II. Russia’s operation has led Russian troops to act precisely as the Nazis once did. Oil and gas purchases subsidize today’s version of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads. They commit war crimes to terrorize the population into surrender. But it hasn’t worked in Ukraine.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin got one thing right: His invasion did lead to Ukrainian civilians greeting troops as liberators. Only they weren’t greeting Russian troops. They were greeting the Ukrainian troops who in recent days have entered villages around Kyiv that had been occupied by the Russians for more than a month.

The Ukrainian government proclaimed on Saturday that all of the Kyiv administrative region had been freed of Russian control. It was as if the Free French forces were entering Paris in 1944.

The reason civilians were so jubilant to be liberated has become grimly apparent. Sickening pictures from Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, show the corpses of residents who had been bound, shot and left by the side of the road. The mayor of Bucha said that some 270 people had been found in two mass graves and another 40 were lying dead in the streets.

 

The atrocities in Bucha were no aberration. There is ample evidence of other war crimes by Russian troops across Ukraine. Human Rights Watch has documented Russian troops committing rape, summary execution and looting.

In Mariupol, the Russians bombarded a theater where civilians were sheltering. The word “CHILDREN” was printed in Russian in huge white letters outside. An effort to discourage aerial attack may have actually invited it. Some 300 people in the building were reported killed by Russian bombs on March 16.

But it is one thing to kill civilians with bombs and missiles. It is another to kill them with bullets to the back of the head. This is a different level of evil — the kind of organized atrocity that Europe has not seen since the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995. Russia’s “anti-Nazi” operation has led Russian troops to act precisely as the Nazis once did. If there is any justice in the world, Russian war criminals, from Putin on down, will someday face the kind of justice that the Nazis received at Nuremberg.

 

This, sadly, is the Russian way of war. It is how Putin’s forces fought in Chechnya and Syria — and before that, how Soviet forces fought in Afghanistan and in central Europe during World War II. They commit war crimes to terrorize the population into surrender. But it hasn’t worked in Ukraine. Russia’s savagery has simply caused the Ukrainians to resist all the harder because they know they are fighting not just for their freedom but for their very survival.

In the past week, the invaders have been driven out of the Kyiv area, with crippling losses. The Russians have lost, according to open-source reporting, at least 400 tanks and, according to the State Department, at least 10,000 troops; by a standard military metric, that means another 30,000 Russian soldiers may have been wounded. So roughly a fourth of the initial Russian assault force — which included Putin’s best troops — is probably out of action.

Some still suggest, incredibly, that the Russian attack on Kyiv was a feint or a brilliant maneuver by Putin to distract his enemies. History will, in fact, record it as a catastrophic military blunder.

Having failed in their initial objective of regime change, the Russians are trying to reorganize their battered and depleted forces to capture the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. This would have been much easier to do at the outset of the war, without those heavy losses. Now the Russians will be hard-put to encircle the Ukrainian forces in the east, which have been fighting Russian-backed separatists since 2014.

How will this war end? No one can yet say. The Ukrainians are rightly enraged by Russian atrocities and will be less likely to make territorial compromises with the invaders, knowing that to do so would be to consign their fellow citizens to a Stalinist hell. But as a former Putin adviser says, “Russia cannot afford to ‘lose,’ so we need a kind of a victory.”

The 1995 Dayton Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia, should remind us that it is possible to make peace even with war criminals — but only after they have been defeated. There is no indication yet that Putin feels he has lost this war. That is why it is so essential that Russia suffer a decisive defeat in the Donbas.

The West must continue to ramp up aid to Ukraine, providing it with the kind of heavy combat systems needed to drive back the Russians in the south and east as they have already done in the north. It is good to see the Biden administration getting ready to transfer tanks to Ukraine.

Other weapons, including artillery, fighter aircraft and long-range air defense systems, must follow. The only way to achieve peace at this point is not by negotiating with the Russians but by defeating them.

As for the Europeans: It is time, finally, to stop all oil and gas purchases from Russia. Germany, in particular, cannot continue paying blood money that subsidizes today’s version of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads. Enough is enough.