Putin is discovering that brutality breeds indignation and resistance

There are reports that, only days into this war, Russian forces are so desperate that they have begun to deploy cluster bombs. These are some of the most insidious and cruel of munitions. Larger missiles release scores of smaller bomblets, akin to mines, in order to maximise the territory that can be made unsafe and thus withheld from an enemy. As with land mines, long after a conflict is over, children are killed and maimed by the devices, which they mistake for toys.

A UN convention has banned cluster bombs, so horrific are these weapons. Sadly, Russia has not signed the treaty, and neither has Ukraine. Most alarmingly, the Russians seem to have been using cluster munitions in the more Russian-speaking east of the country, around Kharkiv, which has put up a formidable resistance in the face of nominally overwhelming odds. A school may have been hit with them. It looks very much as though Vladimir Putin cares less about the welfare of this population than he claims to. Convention or not, it should amount to a further war crime.

One of the few encouraging features of the Russian war on Ukraine is that the Ukrainian and Russian peoples still refuse to hate one another. Yet how much longer can that prevail, when weapons of terror such as cluster bombs have been used?

From what can be discerned from the coverage, long-established ties of family and friendship have helped civilians discriminate between the views of most individual citizens, and indeed soldiers, and those of their political leaders – especially those in the Kremlin. Indeed, the bonds of sentiment may account for how slow the Russian advance has been, with Russian tanks turning round rather than flatten unarmed Ukrainian citizens blocking roads.

Historically, Russians and Ukrainians have been more used to fighting for one another than against one another. Though both are proud nations, neither is in any significant sense a natural, tribal enemy of the other, if there is such a thing, despite some tensions over language and culture in parts of the east of the country.

Yet now, Putin’s merciless assaults on Ukraine’s civilian population – hardly isolated accidents – threaten to seed deep hatred for generations to come. The survivors of this war will tell their children and grandchildren about what the Russians did to them. The children shivering in the metro stations and in the old nuclear bunkers are certainly unlikely to forget their ordeal. Families are divided, losing loved ones to war or emigration.

As with the Blitz in British cities in the last war, and atrocities committed across the world in all conflicts, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, terrorising a civilian community can produce the opposite result to that intended. The more frightened people are of an invader, the more likely they are to fight to the death, the more likely they are to join resistance groups, and the less likely they are to collaborate with some puppet regime. Ironically, it has been true of both Ukraine and Russia in the past, and on the same side.

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Brutality breeds indignation and resistance. So it is proving in Ukraine, and the country’s bravery, alongside the Churchillian leadership of Volodymyr Zelensky, is winning it friends, funding and political support throughout the world. Putin is doing a good job of losing his war, while lengthening the charge sheet of war crimes he will one day have to answer for.

Meanwhile, the economic war seems to be having its desired effect. When Putin threatens to use intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads because the west has imposed economic sanctions on him, he merely shows how rattled he is. No one believes that he is going to wipe, say, Chicago off the face of the earth with thermonuclear weapons just because Russia’s gold reserves have been frozen and Aeroflot can no longer fly into Brussels.

The world is beginning to learn quite how cowardly a bully Vladimir Putin can be.