By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
Russia has found just the man to lead its ongoing
assault on Ukraine: General Aleksandr Dvornikov.
As the Russian military has suffered embarrassing
setbacks, retreating from its planned siege of Kyiv, a top-level general takes
over a war that had no single overall commander. Dvornikov has led the Russian
forces in the south and east of Ukraine, which Moscow will now make its main
objective. This perfectly encapsulates the remorseless and long-running
brutality of the Russian military.
He became known as the Butcher of Syria for his role
leading the Russian campaign in Syria, most notoriously the reduction of
Aleppo. A United Nations human-rights official called that city, after the
Russians were done with it, “a slaughterhouse.” He depicted “a gruesome locus
of pain and fear, where the lifeless bodies of small children are trapped under
streets of rubble and pregnant women deliberately bombed.” That ghastly
description, of course, sounds all too familiar. Naturally enough, the Russian
government honored Dvornikov for his bloody handiwork in Syria as a “hero of
the Russian Federation.”
Bucha is another tragic place name in a long catalogue of
Russian atrocities — perpetrated against foreigners and its own people,
perpetrated when the Soviets struggled for control during their rule, and,
afterward, perpetrated with relatively primitive military technology and with
the most up-to-date modern firepower.
Where the Russian military goes, war crimes are sure to
follow. It is a reflection of a twisted Russian political culture that has
never developed an appreciation for individual worth, democratic
accountability, or humanitarian norms. Vladimir Putin is not to be confused
with Lenin or Stalin — he paints his horrors on a much smaller canvas. But his
cold-eyed brutality is characteristically Russian.
For the past 100 years, Russia has been a brutalized and
brutalizing country. It suffered nearly 3.5 million deaths in World War I,
another 8 million dead in the Russian civil war, and then 27 million more in
World War II.
The founder of the Soviet state, Lenin, was a theorist
and practitioner of “mass terror.” After the Bolshevik Revolution, the civil
war between the revolutionaries and their opponents was a series of atrocities.
Then came the cataract of unspeakable violence in the death struggle with the
Nazis.
The Red Army’s decisive march to Berlin at the end of the
war was one long, pitiless war crime. The Russians raped 2 million German
women. According to Antony Beevor, author of a book on the fall of Berlin, one
doctor believed that of 100,000 women raped in the city, 10,000 died as a
consequence, many by suicide.
The English-speaking world features its share of shameful
and brutal acts, but nothing on the mind-numbing scale of such depravities. And
the crimes in the United States and elsewhere, whether slavery or the
oppression of indigenous people, are looked back on with shame. In contrast, in
the 21st century, when more civilized practices are supposed to have prevailed,
Putin is adding more disgraceful blots to Russia’s woeful record.
What kind of force considers a hospital a legitimate
military target? Terrorist groups — and the Russian military.
In Syria a few years ago, Russia bombed four hospitals in
twelve hours, a savage performance forecasting the treatment they’d mete out to
Ukraine. According to the New York Times, Syrian health-care
workers believed that Russian forces used a United Nations “humanitarian
deconfliction” list containing the locations of hospitals as a roster of
targets.
Recall that Russia leveled the city of Grozny in the late
1990s, killing thousands of civilians. Its soldiers raped and tortured. What
Russia lacks in planning and proficiency, it makes up in barbarity and utter
disregard for humanity. War is hell, but almost all advanced nations try to
keep it within some bounds of decency. Russia is an outlier. For it, the
cruelty is the point — and the reflexive practice.
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