Putin war crimes and atrocities

 Guardian:

As horrifying images and testimony have emerged from Bucha, the Ukrainian town 35 miles north-west of the capital, Kyiv, it is becoming ever more likely that Vladimir Putin has operated by a strict playbook in the north of Ukraine as with elsewhere in the country that has served him well for decades, albeit at a heavy cost to his army.

First, there are the initial errors, including the underestimation of the enemy. Putin’s attack on the Chechen capital, Grozny, in 1999, was as unsuccessful as the attempt to decapitate Ukraine’s leadership in Kyiv within a few days of his 24 February invasion.

Whether born out of hubris, or a failure of his inner circle to be frank with their leader about the limits of the Russian capability, both in Chechnya and in Ukraine, there was an overwhelming belief in the superiority of the country’s armed forces which saw them try to drive long convoys of armour directly towards their targets and into repeated ambush by their nimble foes.

When Russian paratroopers dropped into Hostomel airport, on the outskirts of Bucha, they had initially disappeared from view, according to locals. They were supposed to be swiftly advancing on Kyiv as part of an attempt to knock out Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government and install a quisling pro-Moscow alternative.

Instead, the Russian forces faced heavy resistance, and had to fight hard in Bucha and elsewhere, north and north-east of Kyiv, just to keep the initial ground they had secured. The Russians had reappeared after a few days, residents said, with fatal consequences.

Which led to the brutal corrective moves that Moscow made in both Grozny and is now accused of making in various locations in Ukraine, born out of the belief that brute force through the indiscriminate use of artillery, potentially resulting in the total destruction of a city, will bring a people to its knees.

The United Nations called Grozny the most destroyed city on Earth in 2003 and between 5,000 and 8,000 civilians were killed during its siege. During the 2016 battle of Aleppo, Russia seized back rebel-held areas of the city for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad through a month-long aerial bombing campaign, killing men, women and children.

In Ukraine, Bucha is the latest, but Chernihiv, Mariupol and Kharkiv came before, enduring similar treatment. Firstly, came a communications blackout and the cutting off of the essentials of electricity, gas and water.

What followed was the blanket bombing of civilian targets, alongside the false offer of humanitarian corridors that gave and then cruelly dashed hope.

Infrastructure was demolished, hospitals, bomb shelters and schools targeted.

Ukraine’s government has claimed that Russia is engaged in the forcible deportation of people from Mariupol to the Russian Federation. Many of those boarding coaches for Russia may not care in the first instance where they are going just as long as it is away from the hell that is that port city.

The belief is that faced with such torment, people’s will to fight will collapse and there will be an acceptance of an alternative government, no matter how objectionable.
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The war crimes should not go unpunished.  The failure of the operations in Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine is leaving evidence of the crimes behind in much the same way as the fall of the Third Reich in Germany.  Russia should remain isolated as long as its current government is in power.

See, also:

Multiple Reports of Civilian Atrocities as Russians Retreat

And: 

'It's not a battlefield, it's a crime scene': Putin's fleeing troops leave behind 410 bodies amid evidence of civilian executions, rapes and mass graves in worst European atrocity since Balkan Wars as Europe's leaders call for international probe