The Law of War
by Carlo Graziani
Why Is The Russian Army This Brutal?
We have seen the horrifying and desperately sad images of the aftermath from the massacres carried out by the Russian Ground Forces against unarmed civilians in the suburbs of Kyiv during the weeks when they were fighting for control of those suburbs against the Ukrainian Army. I can’t bear to even recapitulate what was found there. The Russian Army’s behavior towards those civilians was bestial. No other word in the English language can suit the case.
How is this possible?
I mean, I know the precedents set by the Red Army; I can hardly claim that this is a surprise, particularly after weeks of indiscriminate shelling of Ukrainian cities, the erasure of Mariupol, and equal, perhaps worse excesses in Syria, and the grotesque reduction of Grozny. That’s not what I’m asking.
Have you met any Russian people? I’ve known quite a few. They are not conspicuously bloody-minded, or brutal. They love their kids, cry when their pets die, water other people’s plants. There is nothing about any of them individually to suggest that if you got a bunch of them together, dressed them up in uniforms, handed them all rifles and marched them into a foreign country they would instantly turn into a mob of murderous civilian-terrorizing mass-rapists. They are just people.
I know that there are many people who are prepared to believe that there is a peculiar disease in the Russian Soul that predisposes their soldiers to behave this way. I think that this is pure, unadulterated pseudo-sociological bullshit. The problem is not the Russian “Soul”, or “psyche”, or cooties, or whatever. The responsibility for this despicable behavior may certainly be laid at the door of the Russian Army. But the source of the problem is War itself.
It seems to me that very few people appreciate how very remarkable it is that scenes such as the dreadful executions of civilians near Kyiv don’t occur all the time, in all wars, perpetrated by all sides. War makes people act in ways they never would in society. Brutal ways. It licenses brutal acts. It also generates a lot of adrenaline, a lot of anger, and a lot of loss and numbness and hate. It does this to all combatants, on all sides, irrespective of whatever justice there may be in their cause. There is an inevitable effect of war on the psychology of warriors, analogous to the effect of power on the psychology of leaders: just as power corrupts, war brutalizes.
The reason that many modern wars do not produce scenes such as the ones that we just saw in Ukraine has to do, of course, with the Geneva Conventions, and with what is known as the “Law of War”. But the connection is not actually that obvious, because the Conventions don’t enforce themselves.
The Conventions require that all signatories’ armed forces implement regulations respecting the provisions of the Law of War, and train military personnel in those regulations. The principal facilitator and monitor of compliance is the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). One can find evidence of compliance from most major militaries, even Russia’s. The level of compliance matters a great deal, however.
The United States Institute of Peace published a resource manual on Law of War Training in 2008 which explains some of the necessary elements for such a training program not to be a perfunctory formality. For a nation with a large military that is frequently deployed abroad, the requirements get quite complex and demanding, involving, for example, support from an internal judge advocate corps and/or civilian legal institutions, substantial budgetary commitments, annual refresher training at all ranks, and extensive scenario-based field training.
That last point is significant, as the report notes: “Experts stress the importance of field exercises for law of war training—unlike lectures, situational exercises force troops and officers to practice and model correct responses over and over until they become automatic.” You don’t want soldiers figuring out difficult legal/ethical Law of War issues under the stress of combat, because that’s just asking for trouble.
The second part of the report is a country-by-country directory of Law of War Training Program summaries. The US entry states that all military personnel receive training annually as well as prior to deployment on all operations, reported to chain-of-command, consisting of the following:
Accession or entry level—basic training for enlisted personnel, officer training, and Reserve Officer Training Corps. Follow-on training builds upon the basic principles taught during entry-level training. Midlevel and senior-level training takes place at various schools throughout a career, such as at war colleges and schools involving major command, prospective commanding officers, prospective executive officers, specializations (e.g., aviation, submarine, surface warfare, and amphibious warfare), and department head training. Judge advocates receive appropriate training throughout their careers in order to facilitate law of war training and to fulfill their duties as international law and operational law advisers.
Components of US training include “Classroom; distance learning; training manuals; practical scenarios; pre-deployment, mission-specific training”.
In all, 27 country training programs are also described in the directory, from survey data returned by National defense ministries—all nations in the UN got a survey, but only these responded. Russia Is not on the list, because they didn’t bother to respond to the survey. They can put on a good enough snow job to satisfy the ICRC—it’s an international organization, and the reality is that its job is not really to make powerful nations uncomfortable—but it seems clear that the Russians were not enthusiastic about having their Law of War training program compared to other nations’.
It should be clear where I’m going with this: the US invests major resources to Law of War training, and commits major concomitant resources to the judge advocate corps: there are senior officers whose job it is to see to it that the entire US Military stays on the right side of the Law of War. And even with all that, we can still be shamed by episodes such as the Abu Ghraib prison guard misconduct, or that Navy Seal psychopath, Eddie Gallagher’s exploits in Afghanistan. The system is not foolproof. But at least we try.
And very clearly, the Russians don’t, and never have. They’ve never seen the point. War is what it is, to them, I guess. They don’t go to more than perfunctory effort to restrain Law of War violations. And therefore the brutality of war naturally evokes those very violations.
I want to be very clear about what I’m saying here. I am saying that the Russian Army’s criminal behavior against civilians in Kyiv’s suburbs is almost certainly not the product of a deliberate policy of terror. I am not saying that the Russian Army, or the Russian government, should not be held responsible for these appalling crimes. Of course they should.
Because there’s worse news yet: the Russians probably couldn’t stop their Army from committing war crimes if they wanted to. Stopping such things requires the kind of Law of War training that they don’t practice. They could try shooting a few privates to make examples of them, if international pressure made them uncomfortable, but they cannot implant a culture that suppresses Law of War violations that way. So there will, I am afraid to say, be more scenes like last week’s, elsewhere in Ukraine.
Letting loose a powerful modern army on an adversary without proper Law of War training is criminal negligence of the most depraved kind, akin to arming a kindergarden with assault weapons. For that, the Russians should pay. But we have a moral duty to be careful about apportioning blame.
Those Russian soldiers have done terrible things. But most people who are comfortable in the moral certainty that they would never commit such acts in their place don’t know what they are talking about. Most of us have never been tested in that way, and we should be grateful to have been so spared. Without significant training and preparation, almost everyone would fail that test.
Edmund Dantes
Given enough propaganda and time this can happen anywhere. Look at the US and the torture regime in Iraq as the simplest example I can think of (there are plenty more in US history of course)
Poe Larity
It is just so messy an uncomfortable having to look at actual bodies.
This is so much cleaner:
https://www.afcent.af.mil/Portals/82/November%202021%20Airpower%20Summary_FINAL.pdf
And I rest better knowing a lawyer approved every single one.
WaterGirl
What can we do about the war crimes in Ukraine? What Russia is doing cannot stand.
WaterGirl
@Poe Larity: Not sure what you are getting at. ?
debbie
My Lai.
hells littlest angel
How is this possible? Let’s ask Lt. William Calley.
Ksmiami
Send Ukraine planes, missiles and everything they need to utterly destroy the RF in their country… total defeat is the only answer
HumboldtBlue
@Edmund Dantes:
What should Russia do with Ukraine? A translation of Russian propaganda.
WaterGirl
@debbie: *
As horrible as [My Lai] was, and it was appalling, it seemed like the exception to the rule.That sent me googling because I remembered that it was horrific but I did not recall the details.
Top 5 military-related pardons
Trump is not on the list. WtF? on 3 and 4. And “one of these things is not like the others”.
edit: I stand corrected.
Origuy
I’m not sure if it makes any difference, but a large portion of the Russian military is not ethnic Russians. Because of the low birthrate of Russians, they draw a lot from the other ethnic groups; Dagestanis, Buryats, Chechens of course, and others. About 20% is the figure I saw. The Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, is from Tuva.
debbie
@WaterGirl:
Doubtful.
BeautifulPlumage
“I am saying that the Russian Army’s criminal behavior against civilians in Kyiv’s suburbs is almost certainly not the product of a deliberate policy of terror.”
Nope, hard disagree. The violence against civilians has been premeditated and systematic. We have evidence of these types of actions occurring in other Russian invasions and occupations.
Viva BrisVegas
@WaterGirl: Not according to the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group.
debbie
I think this is more about the sadistic nature of humans than about any sort of training.
WaterGirl
@debbie: Doubtful that it was the exception to the rule?
WaterGirl
@Viva BrisVegas: What in particular was that in response to?
Brant
@WaterGirl: Having lived through that time, I can assure you that it wasn’t.
debbie
@WaterGirl:
Yes. My Lai wasn’t an isolated incident.
Carlo Graziani
@WaterGirl:
I would say that My Lai was part of a learning process. Which extended back even to “Good Wars”, such as WWII.
Our narrative control of the Good War by the Greatest Generation prevents us from seeing what in fact our own troops did, on a fairly regular — and pretty well-documented — basis, to surrendering Germans in circumstances when it was inconvenient to take them prisoner. Many such surrendering soldiers were summarily shot. Surrender was actually a pretty dangerous business in WWII, even surrendering to the Allies.
I bring this up not to demonize anyone or to do any both-siding. I’m trying to illustrate my point. It is hard as hell to preserve one’s humanity in war. Many narratives that we have of chivalrous behavior among warriors are basically bullshit. For war not to devolve into total all-encompassing horror requires a lot of effort, and we’re a lot better at it now than we were in 1968, or 1944.
WaterGirl
@debbie: I was pretty young when that happened, so maybe I believed that because that’s what we were told.
WaterGirl
@Brant: Your comment was also in response to My Lai?
RSA
Good summary. It’s notable that the U.S. Army has just four major commands, one of them being TRADOC, the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command. As an institution, the Army puts a lot of resources into understanding and documenting the boundaries of its legal and ethical actions.
debbie
@BeautifulPlumage:
I think if one carefully reviewed the records of all wars, Russia would have plenty of company.
HumboldtBlue
@BeautifulPlumage:
You’re correct. The Russians have done similar in Georgia, Chechnya, Syria, Dagestan, Donetsk.
BeautifulPlumage
@BeautifulPlumage: this whole war has been a deliberate act of terrorism coming from the highest sources. Is intentionally targeting hospitals just a few privates run amuck? It’s a continuous policy from bomb targets to fake humanitarian corridors to torture &,execution of civilians.
O. Felix Culpa
@BeautifulPlumage:
Yes. The Russians signalled their genocidal intentions before invading. And going from door to door, tying up people’s hands and shooting them in the head just before evacuating a village is a deliberate and deliberated action. Not something done in a moment of passion. Also: see bombing of maternity hospital and buildings marked “children” in Mariupol. Plus Syria and Grozny, etc. This shit is policy, not accident or a few bad apples
ETA: In other words, what you said at #25
ETA2: And yes, the US has done bad things too, e.g. My Lai and Abu Ghraib. Calley was tried and convicted. Alas, W, Darth Cheney and John Yoo have yet to be indicted for war crimes (and probably never will), but at least we try to have guard rails and sometimes succeed. I think Omnes and our other commenters who actually served in the military can speak better to that.
Viva BrisVegas
@WaterGirl: The Vietnam War Crimes Working Group was a Pentagon task force setup to investigate alleged massacres of South Vietnamese civilians in the aftermath of My Lai. They documented 320 incidents that were substantiated by US Army investigators, with unsubstantiated allegations of 500 more.
dc
If terrorizing and brutalizing the “enemy” (military or civilian) is official policy, then the outcomes will be even worse. It seems to me that the official policy of the Russian military and their government (Putin) towards Ukraine is eliminationist. So the brutalizing drive that happens to all parties in a war (and that is very hard to control) is elevated to the nth degree.
debbie
@Carlo Graziani:
I think you think America’s farther along than it is. I also think this involves much more than war.
Where do you draw the line on “unthinkable”? Death? What about torture or depravity? What about ripping children away from their mothers?
Sure, there are varying degrees, but it’s all unthinkable, at least to me.
WaterGirl
@Viva BrisVegas: Holy shit. sigh.
Ishiyama
@Carlo Graziani: What you say confirms a personal history I heard about a friend’s father who was a ranger on Omaha Beach and pressed further into German held territory – and at one point he was left in charge of disposing of some German prisoners.
Roger Moore
@BeautifulPlumage:
I think Carlos’s point is that you don’t have to adopt a deliberate policy to get that kind of action. All you have to do is to turn the military loose with no training on what is and isn’t allowed, and they’ll engage in that kind of brutality because that’s the nature of war. It takes a huge commitment of resources to get a military that doesn’t engage in that kind of brutality, and even that will be imperfect so there will be war criminals.
This isn’t meant to let the Russian command off the hook. It’s possible this stuff is premeditated. Even if it isn’t, it’s the job of the Russian command, civilian and military, to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen and to punish the soldiers responsible if it does. That has obviously not happened. Whether it’s policy or indifference, these war crimes are clearly not being punished, and that’s 100% on the Russian command.
Jay
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en/article/gqdx44/full-v13n4
Nelle
My dad was a Mennonite pacifist, a naturalized citizen, who answered the draft in 1942 as a noncombatant draftee. I asked him why he didn’t seek alternative service as my American uncles on the other side had and he, a survivor and witness to atrocities of both Red soldiers, White soldiers, as well as Mahkno’s band of anarchists, simply said, “I have seen what happens to women and children in war and I can’t walk away.”
I was watching Catch-22 and he became agitated after the scene of the American soldiers throwing a prostitute to her death. He said, “I was in Rome right after it was liberated and American soldiers did that sort of thing and worse. Never believe anything else. And don’t you dare say anything about this to your mother.” And he walked out into the night and walked and walked.
Between 1/3 and 1/2 of the Mennonite women and girls in the Mennonite colonies in Ukrainian territory had STD’s from rape after the Russian Revolution, which had an area of extended fighting between the Whites and the Reds. Do I really think that my aunts and grandmother were spared when the Red Army quartered soldiers in their house?
realbtl
I just can’t see the end game. Does Russia not realize they will be pariahs on the world stage for at least 50 years?
BeautifulPlumage
@debbie: I’m not denying that atrocities happen in wartime. This, however, is a known pattern on a large scale. I hear “whataboutism” in your comment.
Fake Irishman
Your commentary on ordinary Russians folks reminds me of Daniel goldhagen and Christopher Browning’s books on the holocaust: “ordinary Germans” vs “Ordinary Men” one (incorrectly) blamed something in the German mindset for the Holocaust, whereas the other pointed to ways in which the seeds of darkness lay in any human.
charon
@O. Felix Culpa:
Support for this being deliberate policy:
https://twitter.com/Ukraine_DAO/status/1510935822610178051
https://cryptodrftng.substack.com/p/day-40-what-russia-should-do-with?s=r
7
Then what follows, very lengthy, is detailed procedure for massive war criming, published by a Russian state media source.
Gin & Tonic
With respect, you are completely wrong. The terror is the point, the method. This is a war of genocide, not anything that can be described in normal military objectives. Russia wants to eliminate Ukraine as a nation.
kalakal
I was at university in England in the late 70s, early 80s and there were quite a few students from Northern Ireland. I genuinely heard comments such as “I’ve never met a Protestant”, “I thought Catholics had horns”. These were the cream of the education system, at that time only about 15% of the UK went to university and they had grown up close to people who looked like them, talked like them and yet were totally the “other”. The Enemy. Demons. These kids had got out. Far too many didn’t and joined various para-militaries.
One thing I learned from that is how much we are creatures of our environment. If I’d grown up in Northern Ireland what are the chances that if Protestant I wouldn’t have ended up hating Catholics and vice versa? Ireland and England have a long, evil and tragic history and it casts dark shadows. Fortunately many brave people did pass the test and NI today is very different from 1976. It was a hard and dangerous road. I like to think I would have been one of those brave and noble people, I also know I may very well may not have been.
Carlo is right: In a war, without preparation most of us will fail that test.
Villago Delenda Est
It certainly is not helpful when the civilian leadership of the country does not give a flying fuck about war crimes. We’ve seen that in this country repeatedly, most recently with TFG pardoning obvious war criminals over the objections of the senior military leadership, because TFG doesn’t give a flying fuck about the repercussions on US forces overseas. His idea of military operations comes from Hollywood, not reality.
debbie
@BeautifulPlumage:
Not at all. I think brutality is part of us all, not just Russia.
Roger Moore
@Carlo Graziani:
Not to be excessively argumentative, but the law of war doesn’t require troops to take prisoners. It’s illegal to mistreat someone once you’ve taken them prisoner, so you can’t accept their surrender and then shoot them, and it’s illegal for commanders to give their troops an order not to take prisoners. But if soldiers decide they aren’t in position to take prisoners right now, they aren’t required to accept an offer of surrender.
patrick II
@BeautifulPlumage:
@Carlo Graziani
I have to agree with BP. And add that part of Putin’s goal is to depopulate native Ukranians and repopulate it with Russians. Similar things have been done before, an indigenous population of Crimea, the Tartars, was forcibly deported to Central Asia from Crimea by the Russians during WW II.
See what is happening in the East Ukraine where Russians have more control and are deporting citizens in addtion to starving and killing them.
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: FWIW I agree with you and not with the author of this post.
Villago Delenda Est
@Fake Irishman: Hanna Arendt I think nailed it with “the banality of evil.” Also too, this:
“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.
Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
-Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials
Carlo Graziani
@BeautifulPlumage:
So, for the sake of total clarity: I am speaking specifically of the actions of the soldiers fighting on the ground, with respect to the massacres in Bucha. I am making a moral argument about apportioning of culpability for those massacres.
I wrote that the Army and the Government must be held responsible. It should be perfectly clear that the responsibility is to be laid at the feet of the officers in charge, at every level, with culpability growing with seniority. I fail to see how you could read this as “a few privates running amuck”.
O. Felix Culpa
@charon: Thank you for the citation. I had read that text earlier, but couldn’t find it. There are more Russian publications that support the thesis that Russian war crimes in Ukraine are an expression of policy. Again, I don’t deny that soldiers on any side can and do behave badly in war, but I oppose any apologias on that basis for large-scale murder of civilians by the invading army.
Roger Moore
@realbtl:
They were allowed to get away with this stuff in previous wars, so it’s perfectly reasonable for them to believe they’ll get away with it in Ukraine. They might even be right to believe that.
O. Felix Culpa
@Gin & Tonic: Agreed.
CarolPW
Vietnam was terrible, but My Lai did not happen in the first month of the war.
BeautifulPlumage
@Roger Moore: This framing removes the intentionality of the acts, which is why I find myself reacting so strongly. This is exactly what Putin set out to do to the whole country. It is part of planned terrorism as an element of war, specifically in a psychological way.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: Do you have any thoughts about what more we can be doing, short of World War III?
In high school, I could not comprehend how the world could allow millions of people to be murdered and not do anything to stop it.
What’s happening is horrible and horrifying. Is the evil so awful that we can’t find a way to do something about it?
Russia must be ejected from the Security Council at the UN and needs to lose their veto power yesterday. Is that even possible? What happens when the rules just don’t work anymore? We cannot collectively shrug and say “we can’t do anything about it, the rules don’t allow us to”.
Forget the UN and forget NATO for the moment, can the world not come together to stop genocide?
Gin & Tonic
@schrodingers_cat: I am done commenting about Ukraine on this site.
RSA
@debbie:
If you’re curious, there’s the Department Of Defense Law of War Manual. The manual has several pages on specialized protection for children; torture comes up but mainly to say it’s prohibited. It’s basically 1,200 pages saying, “Here’s what may and may not be done, with reference to U.S. laws and international treaties.”
TonyG
@hells littlest angel: That’s right. Calley got a sentence of life imprisonment, but it was commuted to three years of house arrest by Nixon. He’s had a peaceful life since then. None of the other members of the army company that killed hundreds of civilians were punished at all. None of the soldiers in that company rebelled against Lieutenant Calley. They followed orders and killed hundreds of women and children (nobody bothered to keep an accurate count : it might have been as many as 500). A helicopter crew finally stopped the massacre, but they were condemned as “traitors” by many “patriotic” Americans, including members of Congress. So — it’s not just the “Russian soul”. I guess it’s the “soul” of all humans when they’re sent to (or volunteer for) a war of aggression, and the “soul” of the people who support the murderers. (I was in middle school when the news of the massacre was on TV. Some of the boys “protested” the massacre by wearing armbands that said “Free Calley”.)
Fake Irishman
To speak to Carlo’s central point here, in a past job for a small consulting firm run by a thoughtful, kind, quirky and extremely intelligent political scientist, I did a bit of work thinking about how American soldiers responded to insurgencies. In my background reading, I came across a document put out by a third party examining US actions towed civilians and civilians Infrastructure in Iraq in general combat operations.
The document did note some systemic issues where the US military could do better. (Eg stricter rules of engagement, using more direct close in fire from helicopters instead of distant airstrikes) But what was striking was all the ways the US really worked hard to limit damage to civilians. For example, in the months leading up to war, us military planners indirectly reached out to UN aid agency folks and asked for lists of buildings and infrastructure to avoid hitting (power plants, water, hospitals, mosques, schools etc) in airstrikes. That’s a lot of time and planning to invest in rules of war and it undoubtedly saved a lot of Iraqi lives (in comparison to say what happened in Vietnam or Korea) Also, the US generally avoided using artillery barrages (sound like anything we e heard about recently?, and constantly tweaked rules of engagement to cut down on the indiscriminate use of weapons in urban combat situations.
Does this mean that there weren’t atrocities, some of which were systemic failures of policy? No, it does not: treatment of some groups of prisoners was a major problem and a stain in our honor, as were some conduct in combat. But it does show the US military put in a lot of time and training on these issues that Carlo is discussing here, and the results were there.
I’d actually be interested to hear what any Vets on here have to say here about their experiences. My Dad was an MP in Vietnam, and he was furious in a way I had never seen him in my life when Abi Garib came out, specifically because of the failure of many of the folks involved to have proper MP training in dealing with detainees. Even as a draftee Pfc, he took his standards of professionalism seriously, as did most of his colleagues.
debbie
@WaterGirl:
History raises its hand: “No.”
Fake Irishman
@TonyG:
“Ordinary men” indeed
Another Scott
@Roger Moore: Yes, it’s a systemic, deliberate policy to ignore international laws and norms.
Ukrinform.net:
Yes, US soldiers did nasty, horrible things in Vietnam and elsewhere. Yes, war is hell and dehumanizes the attackers while killing innocent civilians. But, as Carlo indicates, at the very least the US goes through the motions and has lots of good people devoting their lives to upholding the norms and ideals.
And Calley was tried and convicted (though he was pardoned by Nixon). Putin will likely give the Kadyrovites medals and bags of loot.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Lyrebird
@BeautifulPlumage: @O. Felix Culpa:
Thanks for what you wrote. Thanks also to Carlo G for another beautifully written and thoughtful piece… on this one, I do disagree, or do see a difference.
My Lai was a massacre. more than 10 My Lais in one month committed against the same single city is different. Not that My Lai was less of an atrocity, but having that as policy from the outset is different.
I am exhausted by headlines, I cannot imagine how exhausted @Gin & Tonic: is, where they say “we are SHOCKED!” Okay yes horrified but this was the got dam plan, the Ukrainians have been telling us the RF would do this, the Russian leaders have been writing it out in their memos, RF incl Wagnerites have been carrying out wiping out… Who TF is shocked? That’s not Carlo or anyone here I’m yelling at, sorry.
BeautifulPlumage
@Carlo Graziani:
“…the Russians probably couldn’t stop their Army from committing war crimes if they wanted to. Stopping such things requires the kind of Law of War training that they don’t practice. They could try shooting a few privates to make examples of them, if international pressure made them uncomfortable, but they cannot implant a culture that suppresses Law of War violations that way”
It’s not a matter of stopping their army from committing war crimes when the war crimes are the act that the Russians want from the army.
I appreciate the discussion of the Geneva Convention and current training. I agree that many unpleasant and cruel things are done by individual soldiers on the ground. Your framing removes the intentionality of the acts.
HumboldtBlue
“Liberating Ukraine from nationalist dirt is our historical duty,” says Arctic University rector Elena Kudryashova
Fake Irishman
@Another Scott:
this. Also note A considerable number of American soldiers were punished for actions in Iraq: prison sentences, dishonorable discharges, reduction in rank etc.
Lyrebird
My JAG great-uncle was also horrified.
@WaterGirl: I don’t know what more we can do specifically on that front. Did you see what I linked on Betty C’s thread about what Ukraine has already done to prosecute R thus far? Not that it provides any big solutions.
patrick II
The M16 rifle of Vietnam was designed, in part, specifically to get around the Geneva convention. Because lead bullets entered a small hole, spread and came it a big one it killed a high percentage of soldiers hit by it. The Geneva conventions called for steel-jacketed bullets to lessen the damage in future wars. So, the designers of the M16 designed as a rifle for war that was lighter and shot smaller rounds — the .223 so it was easier to carry and handle. But in addition to those advantages, they designed the rifle with a lesser twist in the barrel so when the bullet hit the target it tumbled. So, a smaller, high speed bullet with less spin would cause similar damage to the pre-convention lead bullets, technically following the convention in form but not in spirit. It was just a better killing machine.
War is a ruthless endeavor.
The barrel has been upgraded so the spin is higher and more suitable for the longer range of later U.S. wars as opposed to Vietnam’s jungle warfare. It is still light and the bullets travel very fast and will bounce around a bit before they exit.
Professor Bigfoot
@Gin & Tonic: I hope you will reconsider.
Your comments, coming from someone “with skin in the game,” are, to me, enlightening.
Carlo Graziani
@BeautifulPlumage:
I honestly don’t understand you. If historians of this conflict failed to find an Russian operations order that said “kill as many Bucha civilians as possible”, would you be disappointed?
You should not be. The fact that the Russians sent that army there with no positive control over its behavior towards civilians is simply depraved. That’s my point. Anyone with any serious experience of war should have expected exactly what happened without the necessity of any such order.
Fake Irishman
@BeautifulPlumage:I read this as Carlo pointing out there are multiple layers to the atrocities being committed by Russian forces, not him downplaying or removing responsibility for them.
WaterGirl
@BeautifulPlumage:
@Carlo Graziani:
I’m not sure that I see your framing as removing the intentionality of the acts, but I also don’t see your framing as acknowledging the intentionality of what’s happening.
You make a good case that war can turn people into monsters (my wording, not yours) if there isn’t good training and total lack of tolerance for anything even close to a war crime.
Whether you thought of it this way when you wrote this piece, I am wondering whether you now see these horrors as deliberate and intentional – as orders from the top down – in addition to everything else.
stacib
@Gin & Tonic: That surely would make me sad. I look forward to your perspective on all of these posts. I do have a question that kind of related to what Carlo is saying here.
The Ukrainian people were living every day lives – taking care of their kids, working, going to school. Putin has turned so many of them into warriors. How do you think they will recover? I once killed an animal, and it practically wrecked me. How will this people survive all of the things they are being made to do? I’m not sure who I feel worse for – the people that are doing the fighting, the civilians who are having to live (and die), the children (omg, the children).
At any rate, I hope you reconsider. Your voice is needed.
terry chay
Two disagreements.
1. It isn’t the Geneva Conventions per se. Such things are, themselves an outgrowth of war itself as an unnatural state. By this I mean, what separates war from murder? If there is no separation, then every warrior (soldier) is therefore a murderer. This is why every army in history has had an officer class. This is why every officer class has been defined with concepts such as “honor.” This is why there are always “rules” of war. Without them, what happens is murder and these people are murderers.
2. It is likely that the intended effect of what happened north of Kiev was planned and not a biproduct, nor was the same endemic to the military. The same hasn’t happened in Kherson. A different atrocity is happening in Mariupol. This was no accident. These people were brought in to commit these acts in Kyiv. They never reached Kyiv so the committed these acts in the suburbs. I bet when it is all analyzed they will be able to attribute these acts to specific divisions specifically tasked to do this.
What you are talking about is that Russia, because of crummy training has this specifically in their military. Our country has these exact same elements, However, it exists (pretty much) outside our military because our training (and most militaries) forbids its existence inside. Since Russia is a criminal enterprise, there is no distinction between war and murder so it is relatively easy to have instructed this sort of thing directly inside its military. Same reason it’s pretty easy to get them to shell schools and the like.
One of the worst things 9/11 did was elevate those extremists to the level of countries. We should have treated the, like the criminals they were. Russia is a country of criminals (not Russians themselves, talking about the politics and economic setup). As criminals, laws are for other people.
debbie
@Another Scott:
The difference is consequences, but when these acts should not have happened in the first place, consequences are meaningless. They certainly haven’t served as deterrence.
John Revolta
I think it has to do with the the way everybody at Stalin’s speeches was afraid to be the first one to stop applauding. You’re trained to know that everyone is watching everyone else, and insufficient zeal could mean that you’re the next one to have the brutality turned on you.
Fake Irishman
A general request everyone:
Could we please try to read each other’s comments, arguments and questions here charitably?
Jay
Carlo Graziani
@Professor Bigfoot:
Seconded
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Fake Irishman:
I had a book written in 1918 by the last American Ambassador to Imperial Germany before America’s entry into the Great War (loaned it to a friend, it never came back). Anyway, the Ambassador predicted the Holocaust right down to the time frame, said that antisemitism so permeated German culture that it would be the natural end result of defeat.
SteveinPHX
Thank you for your essay. Needed to be said.
WaterGirl
@Professor Bigfoot: I second that. I think many of us here feel this very personally because of Gin & Tonic’s connections and all the information we have that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.
I think this discussion has been very illuminating, and between this discussion and new information coming out, I find myself believing more strongly that top-down intentionality is at work here, in addition to the ugliness of war. So this post and the comments are certainly having an impact on my thinking.
I have been thinking for weeks that although it wasn’t being widely discussed, I knew that women and girls were surely being raped. I’m not sure if that happening in silence is worse than knowing what is happening.
It’s hard to comprehend this level of evil.
Miss Bianca
@WaterGirl: Yeah, I’m having a hard time with the argument that the Russian Army’s particular depravity with regard to Ukraine is just part of a general laxity on the part of the Russian brass towards the law of war, rather than a deliberate terroristic and genocidal campaign.
sdhays
I think the situation with Russia’s military goes beyond neglect of the concept of the Law of War. They brutalize their troops in peacetime. Uniquely horrific brutality has a long history in the Russian military, and the modern military has not changed this tradition.
And, as others have noted, there is plenty of evidence that there is a deliberate policy of committing heinous atrocities to evoke terror. I think your point is valid, but Russia has clearly stepped beyond what you describe.
patrick II
@Fake Irishman:
Although the army did all of the things you assert to avoid civilian casualties, prisoners at Abu Ghraib were not considered civilians. SEARS is a school for soldiers, usually special forces, that teaches (or taught, I don’t know if it is still around by that name) how to resist torture. VP Cheny advocated using techniques used (but held back for training purposes) at SEARS on prisoners of war not just held by the CIA but against high-value targets generally. Torture during the Iraq war became a thing. That it bled over the general ranks who were holding lower intelligence value prisoners of war is not a surprise.
Lyrebird
@Gin & Tonic: I was typing my bit about how beyond exhausted you might be while you typed your comment.
Whatever you do to take care of yourself, know that your family connections are in my family’s prayers along with Pres Zelensky’s family.
Fake Irishman
@Gin & Tonic:
in all seriousness, Take as long of a break as you need, but please come back, I and A lot of other folks here value your perspective and your urgency and firsthand knowledge of current events and familiarity with Ukrainian history reminds me that real folks are in the ground in this thing and that’s a useful corrective for some of my first analytical impulses.
(also, lighting candles for all your friends and extended family. No need to update on whereabouts, but we want them safe)
BeautifulPlumage
@Carlo Graziani: I guess I don’t understand your thesis. The original quote I responded to came just after this sentence: “I want to be very clear about what I’m saying here.”
And let me repost: “I am saying that the… behavior… is almost certainly not the product of a deliberate policy of terror.”
Huh, almost certainly not deliberate? Just some isolated soldiers out wilding, not being controlled by their upper command?
WaterGirl
@Lyrebird: It has been a crazy busy day for me, so I haven’t made my way through all of the threads. I have started to read all of them, though.
I will take a look at what you linked to. Thanks.
Professor Bigfoot
@WaterGirl: it is the commentariat here that makes the place (and now better, thanks you!!).
I find that whatever the issue being discussed, by the end of the comment thread it will have been thoroughly hashed out by very bright people— with a generous splash of snark.
And Gin & Tonic’s contributions were… well, again, I really hope he reconsiders. His viewpoint is valuable.
Fake Irishman
@Villago Delenda Est:
of course!
Another Scott
@debbie: This reminds me of Biden’s recent comments about sanctions and deterrence.
Most people don’t murder not because they worry about going to jail for 30 years, or being executed, or other personal consequences of their actions. They don’t murder because they don’t think that that’s a way to act toward other people.
It’s the culture and the upbringing and the norms and all the rest, not consequences after the fact.
“Where you stand depends on where you sit.”
If your time in the military is chaotic and brutal and personally dehumanizing, then you will probably behave that way, too, even if (hypothetically) one weren’t given orders to attack civilians. If you’re thinking about consequences, then it is far, far too late.
My $0.02.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@Villago Delenda Est:
I second Captain Gilbert.
Jay
Fake Irishman
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I believe it, but pinning it all on the Germans let’s every other European culture shot through with Antisemitism off the hook for their roles in the Holocaust. The Danes made a concentrated effort to keep the Germans away from Danish Jews; the French and Hungarians tended to help them round Jews up. That shows up in the casualty lists.
dr. luba
One has to consider the current war in the context of Ukrainian history wrt Russia, which has been trying to erase Ukrainian identity since tsarist times.
Wikipedia gives a chronology of the suppression of the Ukrainian language going back to the 17th century. In the 19th century, in areas under Russian control, it was illegal to publish or teach in Ukrainian. Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national hero, spent his adulthood in exile for the crime of writing in Ukrainian.
In the 20th century, Lenin allowed national identity to flourish…..initially. Stalin however said “fuck that” and killed the Ukrainian intelligentsia and then Ukrainian peasants throughout the USSR (not just in Ukraine proper) via the Holodomor (famine-genocide).
And the USSR continued Russification, both linguistically (via education and publication) and physically, by moving ethnic Russians into non-Russian republics (especially Ukraine and the Baltic states) and moving Ukrainians into Siberia and other Russian areas, so they will assimilate.
Putin is just continuing historical Russian policies–denying the existence of Ukraine or Ukrainians, and then attempting to kill of the leadership……..and as much of the population as possible.
We’ve seen it all before. Why do you think Ukrainians are fighting so hard instead of just giving in? Because they know what will happen…..
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca:
I don’t think that’s what Carlo is saying.
If I had to guess – and Carlo will most certainly speak up and let us all know if my guess is totally wrong – I would say that this essay is a reaction to the moral superiority of “what’s happening is so horrible, these people are monsters” rather than realizing that the horror of war would likely turn most of us into monsters, if there weren’t a whole lot of guardrails in place.
I don’t see that as diametrically opposed to “this is intentional and has been part of the plan from day 1”.
I can understand how someone could read this piece and react to the fact that this is a theoretical discussion and that it’s not acknowledging that these horrors are absolutely intentional.
Ruckus
@Carlo Graziani:
Not having been sent into actual warfare, this is a segment that I can not directly speak to.
I did spend 2 months in a navy hospital with a lot of US marines back in the early 70s. That was interesting and informative to say the least. And I have, over the last 10 yrs, spent a lot of time at a major VA facility, one of the hospitals. I see and have spoken to a lot of vets that have seen more than their share of actual fighting. And I’ve known those that I’d say were broken by the ordeal. Some badly. Now that doesn’t speak to any involvement in war crimes but it has told me that you are correct, it isn’t roses and ice cream. People will do things in warfare that would never cross their minds in normal life. And sometimes it takes years/decades to be able to talk about it. If they can at all.
Fake Irishman
@patrick II:
Fair point, I’m glossing over some major differences between civilians and enem y combatants. But I think the broader point about the importance of rules of war stands (and you add to it by pointing out where US policy utterly failed in Iraq).
Wapiti
@Fake Irishman: I’d actually be interested to hear what any Vets on here have to say here about their experiences.
I was a company commander in Panama; we weren’t on the front lines. Just last week, sorting through papers I came across notes from the operations order. Much of it was “execute the plan we’ve been practicing, be in position by ____ hour.” But there were also law of war notes – a comment that we’d be there after the war was over, so don’t kill anyone you didn’t need to; let the PDF (Panamanian Defense Forces) surrender if it could be done without loss of US forces; and no looting – it’s a court-martial offense.
Since then there’s been a few wars. I was a referee/evaluator on exercises where they had civilian contractors playing the part of foreign national civilians – sometimes hired from Arabic-speaking groups, for example – to challenge the translators and civil affairs teams.
sdhays
@BeautifulPlumage: I don’t think he’s saying it’s “isolated soldiers”. It’s that keeping war crimes to a minimum in an all-out war requires a lot of effort and commitment that Russia never cared about. At a minimum, they unleashed a large army without any sort of training or guidance on how to avoid committing war crimes, which made atrocities inevitable.
I think it was a mistake to say “almost certainly not the product of a deliberate policy of terror”, because 1) there’s evidence that a deliberate policy of terror existed and exists and 2) it distracts from the main point which is a deliberate policy wasn’t necessary to generate indiscriminate war crimes.
There are many layers to the level of horror that Russia has built.
The Pale Scot
Hell ya. This is policy going back to WW2.
Unleash the dogs of war….etc
Scratch a Russian and find an Orc
“I’m sure some of them are very nice people”
O. Felix Culpa
@Miss Bianca:
Your instinct is correct. See Timothy Snyder’s (Levin Professor of History at Yale. Author of “Our Malady,” “The Road to Unfreedom,” “On Tyranny,” “Black Earth,” “Bloodlands,” and “Reconstruction of Nations”) tweet from earlier today (bolding mine):
Fake Irishman
@Ruckus:
if you don’t mind me asking,
are you a volunteer or Vet or employee at the VA ( or all of the above?) and what do you do?
Im a health researcher attached attached to the VA. It’s an interesting place to work with a lot of interesting people. And despite its problems and bureaucracy, it’s a really cutting edge health care system that does amazing work.
Fake Irishman
@sdhays: I’ll cosign this excellent comment.
coin operated
@Gin & Tonic: I hope you stick around and continue commenting.
patrick II
@Fake Irishman:
And it failed for stupid reasons. Torture gets soldiers to tell you what you want to hear, not necessarily the truth. Is Iraq developing WMD? NO. (more torture) Is Iraq developing WMD? no. (more torture) Is Iraq developing WMD? yes.
Ruckus
@RSA:
Yes they do.
As much of this that they do, as much as it may control some actions/reactions, that does not stop war or the often human and/or inhuman reaction to being involved in it. I can think of a number of actions that fit this bill that have gone public, and I know second hand of actions that I don’t think I could have ever done. But I don’t think any human actually knows until faced with actual war, what they would/will do in any circumstance.
And if none of this training is done it makes it highly likely that more inhuman actions will take place.
Fake Irishman
@Wapiti:
thanks! This is nice nugget of perspective on emphasis in a rather major US operation. (1989 Panama invasion) any one else out there?
sdhays
@Another Scott: Yes, the things I’ve read about how dehumanizing it is to be in the Russian Army are horrific crimes on their own. Russian grunts aren’t fully human – to Russians. I mean, 200 years ago, the Russian Army was literally a slave army, and the mentality is still there.
ETA: And that doesn’t absolve them of being monsters. It’s just important context.
Omnes Omnibus
Three observations: 1. I was in the same OCS company that Calley was in, but about 20 years later. I can tell you that Calley actions were condemned in that environment and that he was regarded as someone to be ashamed of. During the course, as a part of our law of war training, we also went out to the Andersonville POW camp and discussed the brutalities that happened there. Not doing that was drilled into our heads. This is true of every US military school at every level. And yet we still fuck it up on occasion. 2. If it isn’t drilled into every soldier’s head from the beginning and re-enforced constantly, soldiers will start to view the enemy as less than human and they will begin to treat people that way. Again, we try and we fuck it up way more than we should. I think that CG’s point is that the Russians do NOT have. and never have had, a culture of trying to avoid war crimes. That doesn’t make anyone who commits them less guilty. It is, rather, an further indictment of their entire military culture. 3. War is horrifying and ugly. The reason that the law of war exists is to keep the horror and ugliness to a minimum, to allow soldiers to keep their humanity.
edited
dr. luba
@charon: Reading that RIA Novosti article is chilling. It is about killing many Ukrainians and “re-educating” the rest. Very Pol Pot like behavior.
But it tracks with previous Russian actions towards Ukraine (just read the history of the USSR), including genocide.
O. Felix Culpa
@sdhays:
This. It is dangerous to bothsides genocide that is playing out as we speak and downplay or miscategorize the intentionality of mass murder committed by the Russian invaders, when they informed us beforehand and now of their intent.
War crimes committed in the heat of battle by soldiers who are brutalized by their experience and/or insufficiently trained and supervised are a separate issue.
Carlo Graziani
@WaterGirl:
You know, given some of the other things that I’ve written here, it never even occurred to me that anyone would imagine that I was absolving Russian political or military leadership, or even lower-echelon military command, from their criminal responsibilities in this enterprise.
Of course the shelling of Ukrainian cities is an intentional terror tactic. I have in fact noticed it, and remarked upon it. Also the deliberate erasure of Mariupol.
As far as the Bucha massacres being somehow “obviously” related to the expressed Russian will to depopulate Ukraine, however, that is rage speaking, not reason. Please do the arithmetic.
Unlike Mariupol, the Bucha massacres occurred in the middle of a pitched battle, where the Ukrainian forces were much better-matched to the Russian forces. What I was trying to point out is that the particular horror that emerged from that engagement is more consistent with criminal negligence than with intent.
I would also like to say that I was motivated to write this piece by the dispiriting number of comments that I have read in this forum by scorched-earther types who appear to believe that there are obvious solutions to the war involving putting every Russian soldier underground, without realizing the ironic mirror that such comments hold up to these humanitarian catastrophes. I think it pretty likely that if some of those commenters weaponed up and headed off to Ukraine, there’d be a pretty good chance we’d see them in the dock in The Hague one day in the not too distant future.
Fake Irishman
@Viva BrisVegas:
And I’ll bet that report is assigned reading in a West Point Ethics class and at the Army War College.
(also, you have one of the most ….evocative… nyms I’ve seen in here I’m hoping there’s a good story behind it involving a couple of rabbis and a bachelor party weekend that got a bit out of control.)
Dan B
@Fake Irishman: Thanks. Everyone is in great stress because there seems to be nothing we can do to make any significant difference. Putin and his cronies have turned Russia and its military into a horror show. There are few good outcomes when the transformation is so complete.
Ruckus
@Fake Irishman:
in which the seeds of darkness lay in any human.
This. We can develop the ability to say no. It has and can always happen. But we have to actually develop that ability. To say no to ourselves, to say no to others and to support no as an actual answer to the horrors of warfare. Or that darkness will continue to happen and it will happen on all sides of any warfare.
Omnes Omnibus
@O. Felix Culpa: Russians are going to commit war crimes because they weren’t trained not to commit war crimes. That was and is a deliberate decision by the upper levels of the Russian military and civilian leadership.
Debbie(Aussie)
Great read thanks.
I have a question : is there anyway that Russia could lose its position on the UNSC or be summarily forced to leave the UN?
O. Felix Culpa
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you for your comment. I was hoping to get your perspective as an experienced artillery officer.
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes…and the Russians have broadcast their eliminationist intentions for Ukraine. So in this instance, it seems their policies dovetail.
BeautifulPlumage
@sdhays: Carlos brought up the shoot a few privates to stop war crimes (paraphrased) hence my few soldiers remark which was not a good analogy. However, his inclusion of the almost certainly not deliberate argument is wrong.
Also, after reading this from another of his comments ‘If historians of this conflict failed to find an Russian operations order that said “kill as many Bucha civilians as possible”, would you be disappointed?” I’m pretty much done with his BS.
ETA a comment of his in reply to one of mine. Disgusting.
dr. luba
@O. Felix Culpa: Timothy Snyder wrote yesterday;
On Lying and Truth
Notes on Ukraine After Bucha
The lying
that there is no Ukraine
that there is no nation
that there is no state
The war to make the lies true
The lying about the war
The shelling of Kyiv
The shelling of Kharkiv
The shelling of Chernihiv
The old beautiful cities
The shelling everywhere
The bombing everywhere
The ghastly siege of Mariupol
The attacks on refugees from Mariupol
The bombing of children in Mariupol
The lying about Mariupol
The attacks on refugees from everywhere
The reporters
The truth of seeing
The abducted
The deported
The millions in flight
The schools Those bombed schools
The hospitals Those bombed hospitals
The archives burned
The lying about the schools and the hospitals
The lying on Russian television
The lying at Russian funerals
The lying about death that enables
The killing for a lie
The future lying enabled by the burning of records about the past
The truth under everything
The rubble, the bodies
The volunteers
The truth of solidarity
The mass murder at Irpin, the bodies under tanks
The mass murder at Bucha, the hands behind backs
The mass murder at Trostyanets, the desecration of corpses
The cities, the towns, the villages, the countryside
The murders everywhere
The truth
Omnes Omnibus
Agreed.
Fake Irishman
@Carlo Graziani
thank you for extending and clarifying your remarks. That last paragraph of your rings true for me. A big struggle for me is to keep reminding myself “there but for the grace of God go I.” It’s a reminder that in the 1950s I likely wouldn’t have been a Civil rights protester in the south and I wouldn’t have been able to resist the Nazis in the 1930s. I hope that if I have some humility about my own motivations, courage and abilities, that maybe, just maybe, if the test comes that I might do better than I would have if I were aggressively certain of myself from the safety front my own couch in a nice house in a good neighborhood of an Industrialized democracy.
Fake Irishman
@Omnes Omnibus: me too.
Fake Irishman
@Omnes Omnibus:
thanks! This is further good perspective from some one who has been there in the military.
debbie
@Debbie(Aussie):
If they had the will, they could expel Russia. Russia’s actions violate the charter as well as international law. Allowing Russia to remain in the UN only makes the rest of the world look feckless.
O. Felix Culpa
@dr. luba: Heartbreaking.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: Indeed. The Great Patriotic War was one in which the Geneva Conventions were ignored by both sides. The Germans were much more willing to adhere to them in the West, but in the East, they believed they were fighting against subhumans, and the Russians returned the favor.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: “Russians do have” should be “Russians do not have.”
WaterGirl
@Debbie(Aussie): I have the same question. What do you do when the rules failed to address the situation you are now in? Shrug and say “the rules blah blah blah there’s nothing we can do” even if doing nothing is terribly wrong?
It’s so complicated, and add in the threat of nuclear war, and it’s a hundred times more complicated.
I am just grateful that we have the Biden administration with competent people, but even so I feel that we need to be doing more, though at the same time I also believe that if we could do more then we would be doing it. It’s so complicated, and we don’t have a hundredth of the information that the administration has.
And in the middle of all of it, the Rs are playing politics with judges and CRT and worse. It’s overwhelming at times.
BeautifulPlumage
@O. Felix Culpa: well said, better than I could put it.
O. Felix Culpa
@Omnes Omnibus: I figured that’s what you meant and inserted a mental “not” in that sentence. :)
PJ
@Fake Irishman: Torture of anyone accused of “terrorism” was US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. No one was punished for this.
Jay
@Debbie(Aussie):
nobody gets kicked out of the UNGA.
there are discussions evolving that Russia “inherited” the USSR’s seat in the UNSC, with out properly applying and that submission being voted on, that in theory, could eventually lead to Russia’s veto being stripped,
but, with gene swapping, one could pair an Andes Eagle, with a pony, add in some rhino genes and with Mar’s Corporate Sponsorship, get a flying Unicorn that sprays rainbow Skittles(TM) out it’s butt.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: I fixed that.
Ruckus
@Gin & Tonic:
My comments so far have seemed to agree with Carlo and I can see how it could go either way. And there certainly are what I consider war crimes happening in Ukraine. And considering what training I received concerning limits I know that there can and will be instances of war crimes being committed in any warfare by any state, because humans are involved. And I also am saying that I think you are right because there is too much of it going on and too many types of things going on to be anything but intentional. Gang rape and tying people up and shooting them? Many people end up thinking that their enemy is the most horrible people but the Russians seem to be trying to prove it. Have we heard of wholesale slaughter of Russian troops by Ukraine? I can’t recall. We sure have of unarmed civilians by Russian troops.
TonyG
@TonyG: And, of course, the Mi Lai massacre was just the one that got publicized — because of the actions of that helicopter crew. Nobody knows how many other massacres of civilians there were in Vietnam. None of this takes away from the criminality of what the Russians are doing in Ukraine — but the U.S. has its own history of war crimes in its wars.
sdhays
@Carlo Graziani: Speaking for myself, the reason that the sentence I quoted above was distracting is that there were reports of Russian units specifically sent to Kyiv to wage terror, which undermines the idea that the atrocities in Bucha were not part of a deliberate policy. At the very least, we definitely don’t know that it wasn’t completely deliberate. It was distracting because I was pretty sure that you weren’t trying to absolve anyone of anything, but it seemed out of step with what I know so far.
I think you’re making an important point that it didn’t have to be deliberate in order for things like this to happen, but I think a little less certainly in that one sentence would have avoided some confusion.
I definitely agree with your desire to push back on some of the darker things written here. It isn’t good for anyone’s mental health, and it really doesn’t help Ukraine.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I still keep on going back to they left their dead mixed up with their victims. I think these guys have been abused and traumatized to the point they’ve given up mentally. If I understand that right it was the “elite” paratroopers who were doing this and they’ve been doing this for years to civilians.
West of the Rockies
I wonder what untold miseries and acts of violence will be visited upon the families some of these Russian soldiers will return to or create. What acts of domestic violence and child abuse will they visit upon those they profess to love. How do they not return home damaged, ashamed, or deranged?
So, so much misery they are creating for so many people.
kalakal
@Miss Bianca:
I think it’s both.
In any war the leaders don’t have to give special orders for murders and rapes to occur. They will happen.
Throughout history troops have raped and looted, some armies have taken steps to limit that, there are codes and laws of war. The US goes to great lengths to prepare its troops to prevent atrocities, does not always succeed but it tries.
Putin and his commanders have gone in the opposite direction.
That’s intentional
Those troops have been prepped to believe they’re the good guys fighting the Nazis. They’re not fighting people they’re fighting monsters and you exterminate monsters.
That’s intentional on Putin and his commanders part.
On top of that, there are units that are the equivalent of the einsatzgruppen and the Dirlewanger brigade, eg the Chechens. They are there to murder and terrorize civilians.
That’s intentional on Putin and his commanders part.
Indiscriminate shelling & bombing of cities is mass murder of civilians.
That’s intentional on Putin and his commanders part.
Putin and his commanders are responsible for this war and all its horror and misery. A lot of the Russian forces probably have no special orders to indiscriminately slaughter innocents, some will do that anyway, given their lack of training. Worse Putin and the states rhetoric have put them in the mindset that they were to be welcomed as liberators, freeing the oppressed people of Ukraine from their evil Nazi overlords, anyone resisting this noble cause must be a monster. When they instead met fierce resistance and they started to die it didn’t take special orders for them to lash out and take it out on anyone at hand.
But beyond that, there seem to be units, like the Chechens that do have special genocidal orders and those orders come from on high.
Retreating armies sometimes murder random civilians as they go without that being intentional policy,( it usually isn’t, the commanders want those troops away from the enemy as fast as possible), it doesn’t take the time round them up and put bags over their heads first, those are special orders.
PJ
@Carlo Graziani: You’ve got your facts mixed up. Fighting has been going on in Mariupol for weeks – that’s why the Russians haven’t taken it yet. Bucha, on the other hand, was occupied on the third day of the war and was held by the Russians for a month. The civilians in Bucha weren’t killed because there was street to street fighting in Bucha and they got in the way – they were murdered because the Russians stationed there (who were, again, not involved in combat at the time) thought it would be cool to kill a bunch of Ukrainians. I don’t think anyone knows at this point whether they had deliberate orders to do that, but we can see from what the Russians have been putting out that they consider the Ukrainians as less than human creatures who need to be exterminated – why else would they order all those body bags?
lashonharangue
@O. Felix Culpa: I am reading Bloodlands now. Yes it is policy that goes back a long way. The same “Russians are the victim” when most of the suffering is/was non-Russians in the border areas.
Wapiti
@PJ: No one with rank. Privates and sergeants were punished. Important people must not suffer consequences in the US.
Villago Delenda Est
@PJ: Indeed. The deserting coward and Darth Cheney are war criminals. They plotted a war of aggression, then implemented it. That’s the predicate crime for all the gross violations of human decency they committed in all our names.
thisismyonlinenym
@WaterGirl: I had a difficult time comprehending how 40% of the US could allow a million other Americans to die and not do anything to stop it. In fact most of that 40% did what they could to increase the death rate.
We are still in the midst of this genocide being perpetrated by white conservative christians on people they consider their inferior. That covid is now killing them at higher rates is immaterial; they think it is killing the Other more, which is why they are adamantly against any measures that might actually mitigate it.
This is the second genocide these same people have committed in my lifetime, the first being the refusal to acknowledge and address the AIDS epidemic. They said it was god’s punishment for being gay.
And as we know, these aren’t the only genocides nor the deadliest in the history of the US.
I guess as a result I sadly no longer have as difficult time comprehending the evil being done to Ukraine right now.
Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
OMON and other “pacification” groups were deployed to Bucha and Irpin, after the UA were driven out.
While the RA process of conscription/contract deliberately creates brutalized rank and file, there is also a top down “process” for de-Ukranianization of Ukraine.
FTFNYT has studied sat photos. The civilian bodies have been lying there for the last 3 weeks. So, about a week after the Battle of Bucha, and the RA taking the town, the murders started.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Very well said.
wetzel
The genocide in Ukraine is a pornographic spectacle produced for terror in Russia. Putin is creating the conditions for a purge of Russia. It is scientific and programmatic. The symbolic and scientific axes have merged. No mores, totems and taboos. Truth does not exist. Russian citizens are disappearing. They are losing their humanity now and will be on trains soon. The same Army that did this in Bucha is on the way home. The premise of everything inside Russia is terror now. Genocide is the sacrificial eschatology. It is how totalitarianism constitutes itself.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Jesus Christ, if people just have have a US military equivalent to this, how about the Sand Creek massacre. There, both sides do it, what ever it is and David Broder ghost smiles upon you all.
Oh, that’s right, it wasn’t considered an awesome thing at the time.
Bupalos
This is an excellent corrective on some of the…reverse dehumanization?…going on. And it is true that it can happen anywhere without this kind of practiced ethical/legal training built in, when circumstances arise.
But among those circumstances, prominently, is an entire social order and respect for the idea of the rule of law. And that is so eroded at so many levels in a (once and future) totalitarian society like Russia that its a lot more endemic and can to some extent be said to be an expression of Russian military dna. This eloquent offering makes me think of nothing so much as that yes it could be us and could happen here IF we continue to slide down the drain of fractured society and authoritarianism. We need to do the work of training citizens and rebuilding our social fabric now, while we still have time. We have so much more to work with than they did or probably ever will.
WaterGirl
@thisismyonlinenym: 40% of the population seems to have gone mad and has lost their humanity. Truly mind-boggling.
Villago Delenda Est
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Chivington was a Methodist preacher. Yeah, warped Christianity has been around a very long time. Almost from the beginning.
Bupalos
@thisismyonlinenym: theres a parralel but I think these two things are significtly different in degree. Different enough that I wouldnt put them together quite so easily.
WaterGirl
@Bupalos: They are not the same. But what they have in common is a disregard for human life.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
There, someone else is seeing what I am seeing. This maybe just more of Putin is an idiot and doesn’t see the cliff he is taking Russia over, but the destination is the same abyss.
NotMax
Dragged upstairs from last evening:
Does not serve as an excuse for atrocities, but just as Germany in WW2 dosed troops with Pervitin, Kremlin only knows what kinds of drug cocktails Russian troops are now being hopped up with.
Carlo Graziani
I just want to remark that I’m really enjoying this discussion, including all the pushback. Even the particularly vigorous pushback.
LeftCoastYankee
“Russia” as a country in most of its stages and phases over time, has always been authoritarian. As you rightly point out this does not make people in Russia necessarily complicit in the “sins” of the rulers.
If you try to draw a logical line between those sins/horrors and citizens, it is tenuous.
However, you can easily draw a line between the concept of what is “Russia”, and the horrors that went into it’s creation, transformations and maintenance.
Every group of people is capable of good and bad, but when an aspect of what defines that group changes little or not at all over time, it is not an aberration, but a feature.
Russia as a concept includes “authoritarian culture”, until it does not.
Much like the USA includes stealing other’s labor and racism.
pajaro
So I guess I’m puzzled by the idea that it would be military policy to shell civilian apartment blocks, but not to let deployments know that, if you have to leave, you should make the civilian populations suffer as much as possible. The massacres seem completely consistent with the war aims that Russia has publicly proclaimed.
zhena gogolia
@pajaro: Yeah.
Librarian
“The fact of the matter is that war changes men’s natures. The barbarities of war are seldom committed by abnormal men. The tragedy of war is, that these horrors are committed by normal men in abnormal situations.” -“Breaker Morant”, closing argument.
Breaker Morant – Closing Argument – YouTube
lgerard
Brief OT break
https://twitter.com/AdamParkhomenko/status/1511091885200363530
Edmund Dantes
@realbtl: they are banking on their oil and gas to keep them in good graces. Worked for a lot of the Middle East.
West of the Rockies
Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot bit comes to mind… “Think of the rivers of blood spilled…”
Man’s inhumanity to man… The Collosseum, the US Civil War, Nazi Germany, Rwanda, now Ukraine (and hundreds of others).
Some of us are vile and wretched, many more are not (lest we would not have survived as a species). We make individual choices given our circumstances.
“All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
So many Russian soldiers choosing darkness.
Edmund Dantes
@Fake Irishman: but we know plenty of the “combatants” handed in for bounties in Iraq almost assuredly had nothing to do with the battles and were more likely grudge settling and other things where the US army was used to take care of an enemy while getting paid.
wetzel
@West of the Rockies
“So many Russian soldiers choosing darkness.”
This is state terror. There’s no behavioral model in individual psychology.
The genocide in Ukraine is setting the stage for purge in Russia. These were not meant to be secret killings. Understand that the Army and state police are coming home. Russian terror is back. Genocide is now its constitution.
Estonia and Latvia are closing. There is nowhere for Russians to flee. Purge in Ukraine. Purge in Russia. Ukrainian genocide is a spectacle to make Russia governable through terror. It is a world without symbolism, living in a fascist totalitarianism, no mores, totems or taboos. No human values. Petroleum is the greater fuel. Blood is the lesser fuel. They are all on the train.
Who will know if millions of Russians disappear? Why don’t we poll their opinions?
George
@Villago Delenda Est: A lack of empathy, in case no one else noted this, is a sign of a psychopath and a narcissist. Which makes sense. Evil has no heart.
patroclus
Well, I don’t fully know what happened at Bucha and whether there was a deliberate order to commit atrocities. There will have to be a full investigation of it for me to reach any definitive conclusions. Carlo’s thesis may well be accurate; maybe there, there wasn’t a systematic coordinated plan to murder civilians. The fog of war obscures a lot. Maybe there, it was the heat of “battle” and individual actions by perpetrators without orders. But I’ve seen enough elsewhere to conclude that there was/is a systematic plan to destroy Ukraine and kill Ukrainians by Russia’s leaders and military. It’s abhorrent and there should be consequences. I appreciate Carlo pushing back against some of the implications of some of the comments on this and other threads, but it doesn’t really change my view that Russia is deliberately committing atrocities that violate what heretofore had been considered the law of war. And morality.
Carlo Graziani
Incidentally: I hope the delay in Adam’s nightly post means he’s taking a well-deserved break. The guy deserves to go on a fishing trip to a location with no Internet access for a few days, just to recharge his batteries.
Carlo Graziani
@Carlo Graziani: Oh, no, there he is.
West of the Rockies
@Carlo Graziani:
Dude is relentless.
Princess
This piece contradicts itself. On the one hand it insists there is nothing about Russia that makes them more brutal and they aren’t different from us. On the other hand it says this:
”And very clearly, the Russians don’t, and never have. They’ve never seen the point. War is what it is, to them, I guess. They don’t go to more than perfunctory effort to restrain Law of War violations. And therefore the brutality of war naturally evokes those very violations.”
This is a choice. This is the culture. This is the difference.
(and I’m not forgetting the awful things we’ve done or could do, or what our own neighbours in the US would like to do to us. I’m not suggesting anything either genetic or permanent.)
Ruckus
@Fake Irishman:
As I have stated here many times, I did not serve in combat, although I was enlisted navy during the Vietnam war. The navy did a reasonable job of training, including the rules of engagement and warfare. I’m not sure it got to everyone but they did stress this. But of course not that many navy personal fought in country, unless you count the marines as part of the navy, which it is, and those on river patrol boats. But the marines have for the most part entirely different duties than the navy, other than air operations. I know two pilots that flew in Vietnam and one rear seat radar/gun officer. Air Force, Marine and Navy. The navy guy got his plane shot up once and shot down twice before he resigned. And enlisted/drafted can’t resign. The concept that war is a game that everyone plays according to rules is bullshit. That’s not to say that many countries don’t train the rules and at least pay some attention to them. But it is obvious from history and personal accounts that attention and obedience are not the same thing in warfare. Often the two are not on the same continent.
Ruckus
@Professor Bigfoot:
Seconded. Or whatever number we are up to by now.
Wetzel
Institutional analytic continuity since 1930s. FSB has classical operant cognitive models for social construction. Global production. What is the approach to intentionality in this thread. What they call bourgeoise. The purpose of war is peace. The mechanism is terror. The symbolic act of state violence is disappearance. Without symbolic value a sacrificial ritual becomes violent spectacle to create docile bodies through terror. A totalitarian society seeks homeostasis through genocide. FSB has done this before. I am certain the bigger genocide is coming in Russia.
Ruckus
@Fake Irishman:
I am a veteran. I use the services of the VA. I had pretty good health insurance for many decades after I served and didn’t need the VA. But our republican governing experience of the GWB maladministration left me getting older and without insurance, a job and money. The VA saved me. And I find that overall the healthcare there is damn good, often better than good insurance could buy me, even if you are a number. OK and a name. Very occasionally I and others get treated like we are still serving but one can tell the offending party to fuck off and that is almost nothing like being enlisted.
HeartlandLiberal
I keep telling my wife about what I was reading about war crimes in Ukraine by the Russians.
She finally stopped me cold, and said: War is the crime. It has always been like this. Soldiers have always raped women, murdered civilians, committed the most brutal, heinous acts. That is what war is. And always has been.
I had to admit she was right. WAR is the crime.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated that, once and for all, war is a crime which has no productive place for the human species anymore.
zhena gogolia
@HeartlandLiberal: It’s a little different when the country being attacked did NOTHING to provoke the attack.
Miss Bianca
@kalakal: Way late back to the thread, but ya – I think you’ve hit the proverbial nail on the head, here.
Fraud Guy
There are apparently 2nd Amendment arguments that we should arm children…
https://ylpr.yale.edu/inter_alia/infants-and-arms-bearing-era-second-amendment-making-sense-historical-record
Uncle Cosmo
FWIW, a small scene from Cornelius Ryan’s The Last Battle floats up in memory: The Red Army has just rousted the Wehrmacht out of a town on the eastern approaches to Berlin. A mid-level officer finds a small group of women huddling in one house (paraphrased):
And he urged them to evacuate while (if) they could.
….
(o/t Cornelius Ryan was also the name of one of my dearest friends, a Brooklyner who relocated to the DC ‘burbs many years ago. We lost Neil to a massive heart attack ten years ago. Miss you, big guy!)
Paul in KY
@Ishiyama: My father was in Patton’s 3rd. Said they almost never took any SS captives. Those who surrendered were generally shot.
Paul in KY
@BeautifulPlumage: Command Emphasis is the key. To use an old example, when Henry V invaded France he laid down strict laws against harming the ‘future subjects’ and their possessions. This in an age when your pay/fun in an army was in rapine & pillaging. His soldiers obeyed, as they knew 100% that he would hang them in an instant.
That is ‘Command Emphasis’.
Geminid
@Paul in KY: After the word got out about the SS’s massacre of American prisoners near Malmedy, Belgium,* very few SS troops were taken alive by American forces. Senior American commanders turned a blind eye, at least for a while.
This may not have been the case going forward from Ardennes crisis. Unlike the fanatical SS soldiers that U.S. forces encountered at Normandy and the Ardennes, conscripted 17 and 18 year olds filled much of the SS’s ranks in the last months of the war. I think that the killing of prisoners was less common in the war’s closing months.
* December 17(?), 1944, a couple days into the “Battle of the Bulge.”