Atrocities in Ukraine war have deep roots in Russian military

KYIV • In a photograph from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, a woman stands in the yard of a house, her hand covering her mouth in horror, the bodies of three dead civilians scattered before her.

When Ms Aset Chad saw that picture, she started shaking, and hurtled 22 years back in time.

In February 2000, she walked into her neighbour's yard in Chechnya and glimpsed the bodies of three men and a woman who had been shot repeatedly in front of her eight-year-old daughter. Russian soldiers had swept their village and murdered at least 60 people, raped at least six women and plundered the victims' gold teeth, human rights observers found.

"I am having the most severe flashbacks," Ms Chad, who now lives in New York, said in a phone interview.

The brutality of Moscow's war on Ukraine takes two forms, familiar to those who have seen Russia's military in action elsewhere.

There is the programmatic violence meted out by Russian bombs and missiles against civilians as well as military targets. Then there is the cruelty of individual soldiers and units, the horrors of Bucha appearing to have descended directly from the slaughter a generation ago in Ms Chad's village.

Civilian deaths and crimes committed by soldiers figure into every war. It has always been difficult to explain why soldiers commit atrocities. In Russia, however, such acts are rarely investigated or even acknowledged, let alone punished. That leaves it unclear how much the low-level brutality stems from the intent of those in charge or whether commanders failed to control their troops.

Combined with the apparent strategy of bombing civilian targets, many observers conclude that the Russian government - and, perhaps, a part of Russian society - in reality condones violence against civilians.

In Ukraine, Russian soldiers, by all appearances, can continue to kill civilians with impunity, as underscored by the fact that virtually none of the perpetrators of war crimes in Chechnya, where the Kremlin crushed an independence movement at the cost of tens of thousands of civilian lives, was ever prosecuted in Russia.

Violence is commonplace within the Russian military, where more senior soldiers routinely abuse junior ones. Despite two decades of attempts at trying to make the army a more professional force, it has never developed a strong middle tier akin to the non-commissioned officers who bridge the gap between commanders and lower-ranking soldiers in the US military.

To Mr Sergei Krivenko, who leads a rights group that provides legal aid to Russian soldiers, that violence, coupled with a lack of independent oversight, makes war crimes more possible. Russian soldiers are just as capable of cruelty against fellow Russians, he says, as they are against Ukrainians.

But the crimes in Ukraine may also stem from the Kremlin's years of dehumanising propaganda against Ukrainians, which soldiers consume in required viewings.

That propaganda also primed Russian soldiers not to expect much resistance to the invasion - after all, the Kremlin's narrative went, people in Ukraine had been subjugated by the West and were awaiting liberation by their Russian brethren.

Ukrainians did fight back, even though President Vladimir Putin called them part of "one nation" with Russians. The fierce resistance of a people regarded as part of one's own contributed to the sense that Ukrainians were worse than a typical battlefield adversary, said Mr Mark Galeotti, who studies Russian security affairs.

"The fact that ordinary Ukrainians are now taking up arms against you - there is this sense that these aren't just enemies, these are traitors," he said. And treason, Mr Putin has said, "is the gravest crime possible".

To some extent, the Russian military's violence against civilians is a feature, not a bug. The killings of civilians at close range and sexual violence by individual soldiers are a separate matter.

In Bucha, civilians told The New York Times that the moods and behaviours of the Russian troops grew uglier as the war progressed and that the first soldiers to arrive were relatively peaceful. "You have a bunch of sleep-deprived young men with guns for whom, they feel, none of the rules apply," Mr Galeotti said.

The violence has caused scholars to reassess their understanding of the Russian army. In a military operation that seemed - at least at first - to be aimed at winning over Ukrainians' allegiance to Moscow, atrocities against civilians seem grotesquely counterproductive.

NYTIMES