According to Ukrainian writer Jan Valetov, “the world’s second largest army, made up of looters, rapists, murderers and mercenaries, has shown its true face.” In an opinion piece for the Ukrainian news site 24tv.ua Valetov writes: ‘If 75 percent of the population of a country with 140 million inhabitants supports this war and thus approves what the Russian army is doing in a neighboring country, then the Russians are terminally ill. Then they belong behind the Iron Curtain, in a cage, not in the civilized world.’
“Unfortunately, this is the Russian way of waging war,” the Russian-American columnist Max Boot states gloomily The Washington Post† It’s how Putin’s troops fought in Chechnya and Syria and before that how Soviet troops fought in Afghanistan and in Central Europe during World War II. They commit war crimes to terrorize the population into surrender.’
According to Boot, there is sufficient evidence of other war crimes committed by Russian soldiers throughout Ukraine. Human Rights Watch has documented that Russian troops are committing rapes, summary executions and looting. In Mariupol, the Russians bombed a theater where civilians were hiding. (…) ‘But killing civilians with bombs and rockets is one thing. It’s another thing to kill them with bullets in mind. This is another level of evil, the kind of organized atrocity that Europe has not seen since the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995. Russia’s “anti-Nazi” operation has led Russian military personnel to act exactly as the Nazis once did. . If there is any justice in the world, Russian war criminals, from Putin down, will one day be tried as happened to the Nazis in Nuremberg.”
Russia expert Anna Zafesova explains in the Italian La Stampa the origin of this Russian violence: ‘If dictatorships last for decades, it’s not just because they suppress dissent. They create a pyramid of violence where everyone accepts to be abused by those above them in exchange for the right to abuse those below. A sort of top-down deception where generals send officers without ammunition to their deaths to appease the supreme leader, lieutenants and commanders reward themselves by looting Ukrainian homes, and starving soldiers rape and kill civilians to make them feel like they’re part of it. part of this chain of power.’
According to financial news agency columnist Clara Ferreira Marques Bloomberg is clear, even without knowing exactly what happened, ‘that Butsha and similar incidents are a disgrace: war crimes of horrific proportions’. Ferreira Marques says Russian troops will commit atrocities again “unless Europe, the United States and other states react quickly to this horror.” They must make the cost of this war not only high for Russia, whose economy has begun to stabilize since the first massive sanctions were imposed, but also unbearable. And yes, that means going beyond trying to close the loopholes in banking and technology, and finally tackling Russia’s oil and gas exports.”
All those European politicians from France, Germany, Hungary and other European countries who are now discussing the need to maintain relations with Russia will now have to make a choice, writes Ukrainian political analyst Roman Rukomeda in an opinion piece for the independent media portal. EurActiv† “They either become the aides of the mass murderers and complicit in the crimes against humanity committed by Putin and his armed horde, or they immediately cut ties with the greatest fascist and terrorist of the 21st century, Putin.”
According to Rukomeda, after the crimes committed by the Russian military in Ukraine, there is no longer any room for ‘nuance’ or ‘grayscale’. “European societies that still believe in democracy and human rights must demand that their politicians completely isolate Russia and sever all ties with these terrible war criminals in the Kremlin and their armed forces.”
Commentator Dominic Johnson writes in the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung (Taz .)† that after the discovery of the many execution victims in the devastated Butja, the question arises whether there is genocide in Ukraine. The perpetrators in Butja are soldiers from a country whose president denies Ukraine the right to an independent existence and where politicians talk about the ‘final solution to the Ukrainian question’ and the ‘removal of the cancer all the way to the Polish border’ ‘ . Such nationalistic excesses are not blunders. They represent a system.
‘The discussion about this is not abstract, but of direct political importance. To accuse a government of genocide means that this government has lost its legitimacy. People don’t shake hands with genocide perpetrators.'(…) ‘If Putin is indeed a genocide perpetrator, then the Russian soldiers in Butja have not only killed Ukrainians. They have also dug the grave of their own government.”