There they are, on the street: the citizens of Boetsja. Men, some with their hands tied behind their backs, were executed by Russian troops withdrawing from the Kiev area. The images reaching the outside world this weekend are horrifying – and perhaps just the tip of the iceberg. The mayor of Butsha speaks of a mass grave in which 280 bodies are said to lie.
Russia’s Defense Ministry dismisses the news as ‘fake’, but the independent Human Rights Watch released on Sunday that multiple war crimes had been committed in Russian-occupied territory, including looting, rape and executions of civilians.
Ugur Üngör, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD, was shocked by the images, he says, but not surprised. “It took a long time before these kinds of scenes came out, because such violence is not unexpected for me at all.”
Why not?
Üngör: „The Russian army came to Ukraine with enormous ambitions. They would conquer Kiev in three days. That has completely failed, and this has caused great frustration among the Russian soldiers. They took it out on Ukrainian citizens. An execution of prisoners of war could still be called a regular war crime, but what seems to have happened in Butja is a mass murder, a crime against humanity.”
How do Russian soldiers get to do such a thing?
“Imagine: your commander tells you that you are going to win a quick victory, but after a few days the advance stalls. You and your comrades are stranded in a trench, under appalling conditions. From above you will be attacked by drones; you have to collect the physical remains of your friends in a bucket. You live in permanent fear and are also treated like dirt by your own officers. In such a situation, a process of brutalization takes place within a group of soldiers within a few weeks, leading to these kinds of crimes. It’s a perverse way of team building.
“The bodies are also not hidden, but on public display. The Russians knew that the Ukrainian army would take this place and left a ‘present’ in this way. In this way, as a loser, you still achieve a ‘victory’. You saw the same mechanism at the end of World War II, where the Germans continued with executions while the Allies were already standing at the gates of a city. That was the war they could win.
“The rape of women also fits into this pattern. It ensures group bonding between the men and humiliates the opponent. In this way, Russian soldiers hope to break the will of their opponents.”
Russians and Ukrainians would be Slavic brother nations. Isn’t that a brake on such excesses?
“No definitely not. In these kinds of situations, the narcissism of the small differences occurs. You will focus extremely on the details that make you slightly different and better than the other. We also saw this in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The populations there also had more similarities than differences, but in order to cross the line into mass murder, those differences were emphasized and magnified.”
You speak of a process of brutalization. Does that mean that these kinds of crimes could have happened spontaneously, without an order from above?
“That could be. But assuming these executions were not carried out by militias, but by regular units of the Russian army. That means that executives such as Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu can be charged in any case. And because Putin used the term ‘denazification’, these acts were more or less approved in advance. After all, in a fight against Nazis, everything is allowed.”
“In the coming days we will see if these crimes were committed only in Butsha, or also in other places from which the Russians have withdrawn. If the latter is the case, you can speak of an orchestrated campaign. In any case, it is a total war, a war of destruction, see also the attack on the hospital in Mariupol.”
Can we now say that genocide is taking place in Ukraine?
“Genocide is not a light switch that turns you on or off. It’s not that one extra crime makes something a genocide. You look at a number of factors: are civilians systematically murdered and raped, are populations deported, are intellectuals and politicians disappearing? In this war the answer seems to be ‘yes’ to all those answers.”