Vladimir Putin and his war machine get more respect than they deserve from the West.
This may seem a bit counterintuitive. After all, just 9% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Russia and the International Criminal Court has recently issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes.
But if you listen to a lot of the debate over Ukraine, you might be forgiven for thinking Putin’s invasion was just a bad mistake, badly implemented by an otherwise serious country. Sure, terrible things are happening in Ukraine, but terrible things happen in war. What’s left out is that the terrible things are the policy, not the unintended consequence of it.
Reports of torture and rape started pouring in from the earliest days of the invasion. In March of 2022, Russian troops electrocuted the genitals of male civilian prisoners and sexually brutalized women and girls, ages 4 to 82.
These weren’t isolated incidents but the beginning of a campaign of atrocities to come. Numerous mass graves full of corpses, some showing evidence of execution, rape and torture, have been found in areas liberated by Ukrainian forces. The bodies of mutilated children have been discovered. Such horrors can distract from the more routine evils of targeting civilians, including schools and hospitals, and the stealing of thousands of children.
It also leaves out the fact that such tactics aren’t aberrations. Similar crimes were committed in Putin’s other adventures, in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria.
Related video: Russia and Ukraine send more than 200 troops home in prisoner swap (Dailymotion)ut the most conspicuous fact that’s absent from the public conversation is that the Russian military has been a villainous force for more than a century. The horrendous crimes of imperial Russia were part of a pre-modern era of warfare prior to the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war. But it’s worth remembering that the armies of the czars were famously brutal even for a brutal age. Alexander II, the “liberal” reformer who freed the serfs, also ordered the genocide of the Circassians and other natives of the Caucasus. Between 600,000 and 1.5 million were killed, the rest deported to the Ottoman Empire. That institutional memory lived on, like a ghost in the Russian killing
machine.
The Bolsheviks may have dispatched the czars, but they only amplified the czarist approach to war. Stalin’s genocides and forced deportations look more like a contPutin has built on the Soviet effort to turn World War II into a kind of state religion, in which the messianic Red Army saved Europe from fascism. Obviously, the Russian sacrifice in World War II — after Hitler broke his pact with Stalin — was staggering. But the Soviet approach to war — using Russian soldiers as fodder for enemy guns until the enemy is exhausted — replicated in Ukraine today is nothing to be proud of. inuation than a break with the czarist past. And today’s atrocities extend that sinister tradition too.