The West has the luxury of considering Ukraine’s future as an intellectual exercise; after all, there won’t be Russian tanks in Frankfurt or Chicago.
For Ukraine, it’s a very different issue, one that has been clear throughout the 25 months of Russia’s all-out war of aggression. That the war raises not just the prospect of military defeat, but of what follows — a brutality that often degenerates into outright bestiality.
The fall of Adviika in February showed the risks Ukraine faces this year if Western support is delayed even further. As the Russians pushed forward, they were as unapologetic and cruel as before. Reports of Russian soldiers executing wounded Ukrainian prisoners followed the retreat. Telegram channels showed victorious Russians looting the destroyed city for household appliances. Civilians who stayed behind face the terror of Russian occupation.
These are not one-off events. Last year, Tymofiy Shadura, an unarmed soldier of Ukraine’s 30th Mechanized Brigade, was filmed by Russian soldiers saying “Long live Ukraine,” his last words before he was murdered at close range with semi-automatic weapons fire.
The Ukrainian liberation of Bucha in April 2022 exposed the facts of the Russian invasion and occupation. More than 400 Ukrainian civilians were left dead in the streets, many showing signs of summary execution. Torture chambers were found in residential basements. Girls as young as 14 were forced into sexual slavery by Russian occupiers.
Casual consumers of news may consider this an aberration, possibly caused by unit dysfunction, as has happened in other wars — the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for example, or the massacres in some of the 20th-century European wars of colonial retreat.
But this is not the case with Russia. The bloodshed is based on something much more profound — a state-sanctioned policy and even encouragement of brutality. And its roots can be traced back centuries. As the programmers say, it’s a feature, not a bug.
Brutality, destruction, and looting are vital elements of Russian military doctrine. They’ve existed as a pillar of Russian military doctrine for almost two centuries. Policymakers should take note that revanchist powers do not play by Western rules; they disdain not only the taboo against wars of aggression but also the rules by which wars are fought.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a strategic continuation of the Russification efforts begun with the conquest of the Caucasus in the first half of the 19th century. Intentional and casual cruelty by the Russian military has been the spearhead tactic for such campaigns. To see this trend in history is not just a morbid lesson in crimes against humanity, but crucial to understanding what it means to tolerate Russian militarism.
The Russian Empire’s ultimate victory in the 101-year-long Russo-Circassian War resulted in a horrendous extermination effort. As much as 97% of the Circassian population was expelled from their homeland, with more than a million killed by the time it ended in 1864.
In The Circassian Genocide, historian Walter Richmond notes how Imperial army commanders rejected any acceptance of the humanity or sovereignty of their enemies, describing them as stateless “bandits” and “mountaineers.” The vocabulary may have changed, but the modern Russian denial of Ukrainian statehood and sweeping referrals to a “Nazi regime” in Kyiv show the same dismissal of any shared humanity.
Communist revolt and rule did nothing to moderate Russian imperialism. Atrocities committed by both Reds and Whites during the Civil War have been well-recorded, and the Bolshevik genocide of Ukrainians and Kazakhs during the Stalin era is (now finally) globally acknowledged.
The thuggery of the imperial Russian army, now and in the past, has not limited itself to the empire’s wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing.
The tales of the Red Army’s rampage through Germany at the end of World War II are probably the greatest shadow cast across the allied victory over Nazi Germany. Approximately 600,000 German civilians may have been killed by the Red Army in the final months of the war. Far more infamous, and far too often dismissed, are the mass rapes committed by Soviet soldiers. It is harder to declare a conclusive total, but Western estimates range from 200,000 to 2 million women raped during Soviet occupation, including victims as young as eight years old.
The horrendous actions of the Red Army in World War II have long been explained, and in some historiographies justified, as revenge against a state and a people who had visited such horrors on the Soviet population. Putting aside the flawed moral logic of an eye for an eye in sexual violence, this dismissive narrative has long ignored the horrors the Red Army also visited on liberated female victims of concentration camps — including Soviet citizens and Polish women.
With the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in late 1945, a nightmare of the same sort was visited on Japanese civilians, as well as Chinese and Korean women. At best, the Red Army did not care about the monstrous conduct of its troops. At worst, it was using rape as a weapon of terror and a means of rewarding its soldiers.
Western leaders chose to ignore the means by which Putin crushed Chechen separatism between 1999 and 2009. This should have been sufficient for what Putin might do elsewhere.
Consider how the Russian army reduced Grozny to “the most destroyed city on earth.” Consider how he unleashed Ramzan Kadyrov on the Chechen population. Kadyrov, “a psychopath who personally tortures his political prisoners” according to Russia expert Michael Weiss, has had free range over Chechnya for decades. Experts argued at the onset of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Kadyrov’s presence was in itself a threat of excessive brutality to come (his men already had an appalling reputation for their thuggish behavior in the occupied villages of Eastern Ukraine.)
The historical record shows that the Kremlin is happy to pay its brutalized soldiers with the blood and bodies of conquered peoples. What else can be expected when recruits are drawn from a society with such high rates of domestic violence, murder, and spousal rape, and where the government has decriminalized violence against women?
Russian recruitment propaganda, when it’s not playing up some idea of the Russian soldier as a hypermasculine demigod, advertises promises like seaside apartments in Odesa, or “beautiful Ukrainian women.” The implication is clear: you can kill Ukrainians, live in their homes, and keep Ukrainian women as domestic slaves. And Russia makes little secret of its behavior — the brutal interrogation of a suspected Tajik terrorist this month, including severing his ear and forcing him to swallow it — was filmed and then reposted by senior Russian propagandists.
The US and the rest of the Western world bear a great deal of responsibility for tolerating Putin’s evils. American policymakers did little to punish or push back Russian military actions in Georgia, Syria, or Ukraine in 2014. Western hesitation has not just weakened global rules about sovereignty and taboos against rewriting borders by force, it has also undermined the international regimes to punish crimes against humanity.
Michael C. DiCianna is a research assistant with the Yorktown Institute. He has worked as a consultant in the US intelligence community for several years, focusing on military affairs in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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