thecritic.co.uk/is-putins-war-turning-genocidal/
Is Putin’s war turning genocidal?
Campaign Diary: Evidence of Russian war crimes found in Bucha
His July 2021 fable, more Brothers Grimm than Encyclopaedia Britannica, could almost have been lifted out of Mein Kampf, with its mentions of destiny, the construction of false history, ethnicity of nations and regaining territories. Even Putin’s language imitates that of Hitler’s polemical work. Its purpose is the same: to prepare his domestic audience for the reunification of Ukraine, and who knows where else, with the Greater Russian Rei… sorry, Federation.
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On 3 April, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, listed 11 mayors of towns and cities who had been kidnapped and whisked away. She announced that Olga Sukhenko, mayor of Motyjin (west of Kyiv), along with her husband and son, had been “killed in captivity” by Russian soldiers after their abduction on 26 March. The mayors have left behind communities where schools, universities and technical colleges have been attacked; where libraries have been burned; shopping centres and markets hit by missiles; sports centres and theatres bombed. CCTV cameras have captured fuel depots in flames, shops being looted, civilians and farmyards stripped bare of livestock and machinery.
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The testimony of the mayor of the city of Chernihiv, Vladyslav Atroshenko, hints at what is taking place. “They are bombing residential areas from low altitude in absolutely clear weather and deliberately destroying our civilian infrastructure,” he told a Ukrainian news channel. “Schools, kindergartens, residential buildings and even the local football stadium have all been hit.”
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The numbers of cultural targets destroyed, and the methodology of deportations is not spontaneous.
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History tells us that such tragedies are not accidents, but involve planning, and direction from the top. The perpetrators need to be brainwashed and reassured of their immunity from prosecution, that what they are doing is a service for their state. It is no accident that the Russian army was followed into Ukraine by thousands of OMON (an acronym that translates as “Special Purpose Mobile Unit”) riot police.
They sound chillingly similar in name and purpose to the Einsatzgruppen (meaning “deployment groups”), the Nazi killing squads that roamed behind the lines of the Eastern Front in the 1940s. OMON is part of the Rosgvardiya, Russia’s National Guard, which reports directly to President Putin. It is OMON that has been kidnapping mayors, processing forced evacuees and policing newly-occupied towns. On 9 March in Kherson, it was Rosgvardyia units that moved in to beat and arrest an estimated 400 residents protesting against the Russian occupation. They are the Kremlin’s Gestapo.
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The only buildings that appear to have been spared are churches. Presumably this is because Archbishop Kirill — Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus, and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church — is backing Moscow’s “holy war” and has eyes on reclaiming his breakaway brethren and their places of worship. The Kyiv-based Orthodox Church of Ukraine, led by Metropolitan Epiphanius, broke away from its parent in Moscow and was officially recognised at an international synod in 2018. While Kirill may be a pawn in Putin’s plans for territorial aggrandisement, Putin is equally a pawn in the Patriarch’s holy war. In a very characteristic Eastern Orthodox spat, Kirill delivered a sermon on 6 March, observing that Russia’s occupation of “evil” Ukraine was part of a larger “metaphysical struggle” against “immoral Western values”.
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More recently, on 23 March, Beth Van Schaack, the US Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice, assessed that Russia “was committing war crimes in Ukraine”, an accusation echoed by Joe Biden. With experience of similar crimes committed in Rwanda (where I was connected with the judicial process) and Bosnia (which I witnessed as part of the peace keeping force), the prosecutors know what to look for, and already have more than a suspicion that Russia’s abuses in Ukraine are not the result of accidental shelling or rogue soldiery. They think this is a systematic pattern, authorised and encouraged from the very top — by the man who has intensely studied what happened in the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War.
RTB: There is no way, any country with good satellite technology and a good intelligence organisation didn't know what Russia was doing from very early on. No way. It was systematic. It was planned. It had a clear identifiable pattern which mirrored similar situations in both the recent and longer term history of the 20th and 21st Century.
They have the knowledge of history and the experience and skills of dealing with crimes of this nature to know. It is not a unique event we don't understand. This is well studied even by members of wider society - its not niche.
Instead, they have sat behind public opinion or simply sat and watched rather than driving it. They didn't care until the media showed up and made it unavoidable as a subject. Because of a 'its not my problem' / 'I can bury my head in the sand' type attitude.
You can understand why the Polish are also so angry. Just about everyone in Poland will know someone personally directly affected by now. And with that they knew what was happening and could see the non-committal can't be arsed attitudes of others.
Its not leadership. Its abdication of responsibility. Its not denial but its certainly not dealing with reality head on either.
It does not put their own citizens in a position which is better to avoid the subject: indeed quite the opposite.
It makes me incredibly angry. It outright apathy and almost like the response of a deer transfixed in the headlights of oncoming traffic.
I can't imagine how Zelensky feels with all the platitudes tbh. He must feel utterly utterly betrayed. And yet he gets it and why he has to believe in the ideals and why he has to keep persuing them.
There is one last paragraph in this article I want to share though:
On 31 March the Russian embassy noted with fury that one of the World War II tanks on the Soviet War Memorial in central Berlin had been covered with a Ukrainian flag. Russian Ambassador Sergei Nechaev was particularly strident in his demand that the flag be removed, and the perpetrators arrested. His Excellency, already under the spotlight after one of his diplomats “carelessly fell” from a top floor window of his embassy last year, was said to be incandescent at the Berlin authorities’ reply: “As the tank was a T-34, which was developed in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, we see no reason to do anything.”