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>In a photograph from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Ukraine, a woman stands in the yard of a house, her hand covering her mouth in horror, the bodies of three dead civilians scattered before her. When Aset Chad saw that picture, she started shaking and hurtled 22 years back in time.
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>In February 2000, she walked into her neighbor’s yard in Chechnya and glimpsed the bodies of three men and a woman who had been shot repeatedly in front of her 8-year-old daughter. Russian soldiers had swept their village and murdered at least 60 people, raped at least six women and plundered the victims’ gold teeth, human rights observers found.
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>“I am having the most severe flashbacks,” Ms. Chad, who now lives in New York, said in a phone interview. “I see exactly what’s going on: I see the same military, the same Russian tactics they use, dehumanizing the people.”
>
>The brutality of Moscow’s war on Ukraine takes two distinct forms, familiar to those who have seen Russia’s military in action elsewhere.
>
>There is the programmatic violence meted out by Russian bombs and missiles against civilians as well as military targets, meant to demoralize as much as defeat. These attacks recall the aerial destruction in 1999 and 2000 of the Chechen capital of Grozny and, in 2016, of the Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo.
>
>And then there is the cruelty of individual soldiers and units, the horrors of Bucha appearing to have descended directly from the slaughter a generation ago in Ms. Chad’s village, Novye Aldi.
>
>Civilian deaths and crimes committed by soldiers figure into every war, not least those fought by the United States in recent decades in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has always been difficult to explain why soldiers commit atrocities, or to describe how the orders of commanders, military culture, national propaganda, battlefield frustration and individual malice can come together to produce such horrors.
>
>In Russia, however, such acts are rarely investigated or even acknowledged, let alone punished. That leaves it unclear how much the low-level brutality stems from the intent of those in charge or whether commanders failed to control their troops. Combined with the apparent strategy of bombing civilian targets, many observers conclude that the Russian government — and, perhaps, a part of Russian society — in reality condones violence against civilians.
>
>Some analysts see the problem as a structural and political one, with the lack of accountability of the Russian armed forces magnified by the absence of independent institutions in Vladimir V. Putin’s authoritarian system or the Soviet Union before it. Compared with the West, fewer people harbor any illusions of individual rights trumping raw power.
>
>“I think there is this kind of culture of violence,” said Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher. “Either you are dominating, or you are dominated.”
>
>In Ukraine, Russian soldiers, by all appearances, can continue to kill civilians with impunity, as underscored by the fact that virtually none of the perpetrators of war crimes in Chechnya, where the Kremlin crushed an independence movement at the cost of tens of thousands of civilian lives, were ever prosecuted in Russia.
>
>Back then, Russian investigators told Ms. Chad that the killings in Novye Aldi might have been perpetrated by Chechens dressed up as Russian troops, she recalls. Now, the Kremlin says any atrocities in Ukraine are either staged or carried out by the Ukrainians and their Western “patrons,” while denouncing as a “Nazi” anyone who resists the Russian advance.
>
>Many Russians believe those lies, while those who do not are left wrestling with how such crimes could be carried out in their name.
>
>Violence remains commonplace within the Russian military, where more senior soldiers routinely abuse junior ones. Despite two decades of attempts at trying to make the army a more professional force, it has never developed a strong middle tier akin to the noncommissioned officers who bridge the gap between commanders and lower-ranking soldiers in the American military. In 2019, a conscript in Siberia opened fire and killed eight at his military base, later asserting that he had carried out the shooting spree because other soldiers had made his life “hell.”
>
>Experts say that the severity of hazing in the Russian military has been reduced compared with the early 2000s, when it killed dozens of conscripts yearly. But they say that order in many units is still maintained through informal systems similar to the abusive hierarchies in Russian prisons.
>
>To Sergei Krivenko, who leads a rights group that provides legal aid to Russian soldiers, that violence, coupled with a lack of independent oversight, makes war crimes more possible. Russian soldiers are just as capable of cruelty against fellow Russians, he says, as they are against Ukrainians.
>
>“It is the state of the Russian army, this impunity, aggression and internal violence, that is expressed in these conditions,” Mr. Krivenko said in a phone interview. “If there were to be an uprising in Voronezh” — a city in western Russia — “and the army were called in, the soldiers would behave exactly the same way.
>
>”But the crimes in Ukraine may also stem from the Kremlin’s years of dehumanizing propaganda against Ukrainians, which soldiers consume in required viewings. Russian conscripts, a sample schedule available on the Russian Defense Ministry’s website shows, must sit through “informational television programs” from 9 to 9:40 p.m. every day but Sunday. The message that they are fighting “Nazis” — as their forefathers did in World War II — is now being spread through the military, Russian news reports show.
>
>That propaganda also primed Russian soldiers not to expect much resistance to the invasion — after all, the Kremlin’s narrative went, people in Ukraine had been subjugated by the West and were awaiting liberation by their Russian brethren. Mr. Krivenko, the soldiers’ rights advocate, said he had spoken directly to a Russian soldier who called his group’s hotline and recounted that even when his unit was ordered into Ukraine from Belarus, it was not made clear that the soldiers were about to enter a war zone.
I was horrified reading those stories but I was unfortunately not suprised. Lets just say that my greatgranpas were hiding my granmas in the forests every time when Red Army was appriaching during WWII. How did they knew to do this? … they knew from experiance from Polish – Bolshevic war of 1920
2 comments
>1/2
>
>In a photograph from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Ukraine, a woman stands in the yard of a house, her hand covering her mouth in horror, the bodies of three dead civilians scattered before her. When Aset Chad saw that picture, she started shaking and hurtled 22 years back in time.
>
>In February 2000, she walked into her neighbor’s yard in Chechnya and glimpsed the bodies of three men and a woman who had been shot repeatedly in front of her 8-year-old daughter. Russian soldiers had swept their village and murdered at least 60 people, raped at least six women and plundered the victims’ gold teeth, human rights observers found.
>
>“I am having the most severe flashbacks,” Ms. Chad, who now lives in New York, said in a phone interview. “I see exactly what’s going on: I see the same military, the same Russian tactics they use, dehumanizing the people.”
>
>The brutality of Moscow’s war on Ukraine takes two distinct forms, familiar to those who have seen Russia’s military in action elsewhere.
>
>There is the programmatic violence meted out by Russian bombs and missiles against civilians as well as military targets, meant to demoralize as much as defeat. These attacks recall the aerial destruction in 1999 and 2000 of the Chechen capital of Grozny and, in 2016, of the Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo.
>
>And then there is the cruelty of individual soldiers and units, the horrors of Bucha appearing to have descended directly from the slaughter a generation ago in Ms. Chad’s village, Novye Aldi.
>
>Civilian deaths and crimes committed by soldiers figure into every war, not least those fought by the United States in recent decades in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has always been difficult to explain why soldiers commit atrocities, or to describe how the orders of commanders, military culture, national propaganda, battlefield frustration and individual malice can come together to produce such horrors.
>
>In Russia, however, such acts are rarely investigated or even acknowledged, let alone punished. That leaves it unclear how much the low-level brutality stems from the intent of those in charge or whether commanders failed to control their troops. Combined with the apparent strategy of bombing civilian targets, many observers conclude that the Russian government — and, perhaps, a part of Russian society — in reality condones violence against civilians.
>
>Some analysts see the problem as a structural and political one, with the lack of accountability of the Russian armed forces magnified by the absence of independent institutions in Vladimir V. Putin’s authoritarian system or the Soviet Union before it. Compared with the West, fewer people harbor any illusions of individual rights trumping raw power.
>
>“I think there is this kind of culture of violence,” said Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher. “Either you are dominating, or you are dominated.”
>
>In Ukraine, Russian soldiers, by all appearances, can continue to kill civilians with impunity, as underscored by the fact that virtually none of the perpetrators of war crimes in Chechnya, where the Kremlin crushed an independence movement at the cost of tens of thousands of civilian lives, were ever prosecuted in Russia.
>
>Back then, Russian investigators told Ms. Chad that the killings in Novye Aldi might have been perpetrated by Chechens dressed up as Russian troops, she recalls. Now, the Kremlin says any atrocities in Ukraine are either staged or carried out by the Ukrainians and their Western “patrons,” while denouncing as a “Nazi” anyone who resists the Russian advance.
>
>Many Russians believe those lies, while those who do not are left wrestling with how such crimes could be carried out in their name.
>
>Violence remains commonplace within the Russian military, where more senior soldiers routinely abuse junior ones. Despite two decades of attempts at trying to make the army a more professional force, it has never developed a strong middle tier akin to the noncommissioned officers who bridge the gap between commanders and lower-ranking soldiers in the American military. In 2019, a conscript in Siberia opened fire and killed eight at his military base, later asserting that he had carried out the shooting spree because other soldiers had made his life “hell.”
>
>Experts say that the severity of hazing in the Russian military has been reduced compared with the early 2000s, when it killed dozens of conscripts yearly. But they say that order in many units is still maintained through informal systems similar to the abusive hierarchies in Russian prisons.
>
>To Sergei Krivenko, who leads a rights group that provides legal aid to Russian soldiers, that violence, coupled with a lack of independent oversight, makes war crimes more possible. Russian soldiers are just as capable of cruelty against fellow Russians, he says, as they are against Ukrainians.
>
>“It is the state of the Russian army, this impunity, aggression and internal violence, that is expressed in these conditions,” Mr. Krivenko said in a phone interview. “If there were to be an uprising in Voronezh” — a city in western Russia — “and the army were called in, the soldiers would behave exactly the same way.
>
>”But the crimes in Ukraine may also stem from the Kremlin’s years of dehumanizing propaganda against Ukrainians, which soldiers consume in required viewings. Russian conscripts, a sample schedule available on the Russian Defense Ministry’s website shows, must sit through “informational television programs” from 9 to 9:40 p.m. every day but Sunday. The message that they are fighting “Nazis” — as their forefathers did in World War II — is now being spread through the military, Russian news reports show.
>
>That propaganda also primed Russian soldiers not to expect much resistance to the invasion — after all, the Kremlin’s narrative went, people in Ukraine had been subjugated by the West and were awaiting liberation by their Russian brethren. Mr. Krivenko, the soldiers’ rights advocate, said he had spoken directly to a Russian soldier who called his group’s hotline and recounted that even when his unit was ordered into Ukraine from Belarus, it was not made clear that the soldiers were about to enter a war zone.
I was horrified reading those stories but I was unfortunately not suprised. Lets just say that my greatgranpas were hiding my granmas in the forests every time when Red Army was appriaching during WWII. How did they knew to do this? … they knew from experiance from Polish – Bolshevic war of 1920