Horrific war crimes uncovered in Ukraine will leave Russia a global pariah

Seemingly, with every retreat of Russian forces in Ukraine comes evidence of apparent war crimes. Witness accounts and scene-of-crime evidence suggest that targeted attacks on civilian infrastructure such as houses, hospitals, schools and homes, along with mass rape, sadistic murder, mutilations, summary executions, kidnappings, deportations and looting, were standard practices of the Russian armed forces.

Bel Trew’s reports for The Independent on what has happened in besieged Mariupol are especially harrowing: sandpits in the kindergarten playgrounds of Mariupol are now mass graves because soft soil is quicker to dig when burying corpses under relentless shelling. It appears that every spare patch of land in the city has been turned into a makeshift cemetery.

Among the burned-out cars, there are also charred human remains on the roads regained by the Ukrainians outside Kyiv, in Bucha, Irpin and elsewhere.

These were not, at this scale and in this apparently systematic fashion, all incidents of collateral damage or accidents occurring in the fog of war. Inflicting fear on the civilian population was a deliberate weapon of the Russians. Today, the Russian army is the largest terrorist organisation in the world.

So much, then, for Vladimir Putin’s war of liberation to free the people of their supposed Nazi overlords. Far from achieving the historic reunion of Russia and Ukraine he fancifully imagined, such crimes – and all those that will soon enough be uncovered and carefully documented – will drive the peoples apart.

Such wounds tend not to heal easily or quickly, and, in the absence of any consensual political settlement, they will undermine any efforts at rapprochement in years to come. Whatever “agreement” does eventually emerge out of this conflict will be a result of the original coercion of invasion, an “unequal treaty” forced on Ukraine by menace. It will lack all legitimacy. It will make Ukraine more determined on revenge. It will foster insurgency. It will make Russia less, rather than more, secure.

Many in Russia and Ukraine are linked by bonds of family and friendship, and these bonds will be strained beyond breaking point in the coming weeks. Mr Putin’s propaganda machine has effectively convinced too many in Russia that the Ukrainians brought all this upon themselves, and that they fabricated the evidence of Russia’s gruesome attacks on children and the elderly.

The immediate prospect is only of more of the same, but directed towards the south and east of the country. Having been forced to give up on Kyiv, the Russians are bombing Odesa, the major port city on the Black Sea. Mariupol, despite its heroic resistance, may fall in the coming days, and then Russian forces will sweep as far westwards as they can, eventually aiming to link up with Transnistria, a Russian-backed breakaway statelet that is legally part of Moldova.

This would greatly increase the vulnerability of Romania and Bulgaria to Russian bullying, or worse; and it would certainly leave Ukraine as a landlocked, dismembered nation – something neither Volodymyr Zelensky, nor the people he leads, can ever accept.

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The agonies of Ukraine, then, continue, but even as President Putin threatens oil and gas supplies, Nato has no choice but to redouble its efforts to support the Ukrainians’ struggle for survival. This means, as Boris Johnson argues, a step up in military and economic aid, and the provision of anti-ship missiles so that the Russian navy is deterred from playing any part in bombarding or invading another Ukrainian city, and one so economically and strategically valuable. The destruction of a major oil refinery in central Ukraine also underlines the case for more air-defence systems, and the best ones the west can provide.

In these circumstances, with the Russian invaders approaching Nato member states, it is difficult to understand why America and some European powers won’t allow Poland to donate obsolete Soviet-era jets or tanks to Ukraine, to be operated by Ukrainians, when Ukraine is free to buy weapons of war in world markets. There is no UN arms embargo on Ukraine, and it is bizarre for Nato to impose one in effect.

No doubt the Kremlin hopes that the more revolting the stories about these barbarities in Mariupol, the more the civilian population of Odesa will wish to surrender. Yet the lesson in this conflict, as in others in the past, is that indiscriminate bombing tends to build resistance.

The only “special” feature of this “special military operation” is the special cruelty meted out by the Russian army. Even as its troops leave behind destruction and the badly concealed evidence of war crimes, they are continuing to mine roads and booby-trap corpses. It is barbaric beyond belief and leaves Russia a pariah in the world.

Those in Beijing, Delhi or even Minsk who understand the truth about what has been happening in this medieval, unprovoked war should think twice about the man they are continuing to do business with. So should those few in Russia with access to the facts.