We have only scratched the surface of Putin’s war crimes
Views (67)
The Eastern Front is a harrowing film about the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine. It documents, in forensic detail, the war crimes being perpetuated by Russian forces. Putin has already been indicted by the International Criminal Court for forcibly taking children from Ukraine into Russia. After this documentary, you can add torture, indiscriminate attacks against non-combatants, and the use of white phosphorus munitions to burn out civilians. Not in the film, but we can also add the blowing
Directly attacking civilians is an abhorrent method of warfare. The Russians perfected the contemporary version of the technique in Syria. They saw how the Syrian regime attacked towns and cities conventionally for years, and got nowhere. So the focus then became direct attacks on civilians – first by bombing schools, hospitals and infrastructure. Afterwards, they used white phosphorus and other incendiary weapons in a ‘medieval’ type scorched earth policy to burn them out as if vermin. If all this failed, they finally resorted to chemical weapons.
The Kremlin’s unconventional violence against civilians has been allowed to go virtually unchecked for the last 10 years. The global abstinence from the Syrian conflict after disastrous interventions in Iraq and Syria – coupled with the neglect of the Russian Federation as a potential threat since the end of the Cold War – has allowed this type of violence to proliferate. In a similar vein, it is no great surprise that a new report by Swedish think tank SIPRI, details a significant increase in nuclear warheads held by China, North Korea and others.
It is heartening to see that the US government is seriously looking at how to minimise civilian casualties on the battlefield. The most important step forward is to ensure the prosecution of Putin, Assad and all their cronies who have executed their orders. There will always be tyrants, who only react to strength and hard redlines which are rigidly enforced, not hollow threats. Would Putin have bombed schools in Ukraine if Nato had taken out Syrian air force assets who did the same thing a few years earlier? Possibly not.
0 Likes