The currently "Most Popular" piece at the National Interest website has a somewhat intriguing title:
The Source of Russian Brutality
Russia’s military operates on a Soviet, totalizing view of war that ignores distinctions between soldiers and civilians.
That is of course news to me as well as to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Right which is counting civilian casualties.
From 24 February 2022, which marked the start of the large-scale armed attack by the Russian Federation, to 24 September 2023, OHCHR recorded 27,449 civilian casualties in the country: 9,701 killed and 17,748 injured.
Meanwhile the military casualties in the war exceed several 100,000nds. Compared to any other modern war the ratio of civilian casualties to military casualties is thus extremely low. How is that demonstrating 'Russian brutality'?
So lets see what the author, one Ivan Arreguin-Toft, is alluding to:
One need not be an expert on international law to understand how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in March of 2022 has violated the laws’ core principles. The Kremlin’s pretexts, the alleged violation of Russia’s “sphere of influence,” cited by, for example, international relations scholar John Mearsheimer, remain inadequate to justify the invasion of an internationally recognized sovereign state.
Russia's reason for the war is the threatened entering of its neighbor country Ukraine into an aggressive NATO. The Secretary General of NATO recently said so. That may(!) be "inadequate" to justify a war. But what about a war over fake WMD claims in a country on the other side of the planet? Has any U.S. reason for waging wars ever been "adequate"?
On top of that, in its prosecution of an illegitimate war, Russia continues to practice war crimes—systematically and deliberately attacking noncombatants, including medical personnel and facilities. We may continue to debate whether allowing Russia to reclaim the USSR’s sphere of influence is acceptable as a tradeoff to prevent a global conflict. Still, there can be no question that Russia’s continual rape, torture, and murder of noncombatants is illegal and damages Russia’s reputation on the world stage.
The question, then, is, what explains Russia’s behavior?
Those are strong claims. Strong claims require strong evidence. But the link under "continual rape, torture, and murder" does not go to any evidence. The link instead goes to an overview of the Geneva Convention. In fact – the whole piece does not contain ANY evidence of 'Russian brutality'. ZERO! NONE!
So without presenting any factual evidence, statistic or even anecdote the author simply claims that Russia's behavior is somehow different from others.
He is then off to find something that would explain his farcical claim.
During the entire rule of Russia’s Tsars—from the very founding of the Russian state until 1917, Russia’s military was no more or no less brutal toward noncombatants than the militaries of any other state or empire. But the Russian Revolution and the horrific civil war that followed changed everything.
The first part might be true. All militaries were (and are) generally brutal against noncombatants. They often had to 'live off the land' they marched through and that includes robbing and killing everyone who had not left.
But the second part of the above claim, that the revolution and civil war changed that, is strange. Lets look for evidence:
In place of an aristocratic code of honor, Russia’s surviving officer corps were loyal to the person of Josef Stalin (although in 1938, he had three-quarters of them above the rank of lieutenant executed for treason) and, more broadly, to the international communist movement, which they believed was destined to liberate the world from its capitalist and imperialist chains.
Did any "aristocratic code of honor" ever stopped an aristocrat from killing a peasant? I doubt that.
Stalin's Great Purge was actually against Trotsky and others which wanted to spread communism around the world while Stalin preferred a socialism in one country policy of putting the Soviet Union first. Officers who preferred Trotsky's ideas were indeed purged but the numbers Ivan Arreguin-Toft puts into parenthesis are just totally nuts.
Here is what the purge of the army actually did:
The purge of the Red Army and Military Maritime Fleet removed three of five marshals (then equivalent to four-star generals), 13 of 15 army commanders (then equivalent to three-star generals), eight of nine admirals (the purge fell heavily on the Navy, who were suspected of exploiting their opportunities for foreign contacts), 50 of 57 army corps commanders, 154 out of 186 division commanders, 16 of 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.
That sounds like high numbers but more importantly we are taking General ranks here and not all 'people above the rank of lieutenant'. Moreover most of the purged were not executed. The total numbers were also much smaller than had been perceived:
At first, it was thought 25–50% of Red Army officers had been purged; the true figure is now known to be in the area of 3.7–7.7%. This discrepancy was the result of a systematic underestimation of the true size of the Red Army officer corps, and it was overlooked that most of those purged were merely expelled from the Party. Thirty percent of officers purged in 1937–1939 were allowed to return to service.
How can one get from those historic facts to "three-quarters of them above the rank of lieutenant executed for treason"?
One can't. And that is why one should stop reading that trash piece right there. The rest gets only worse.
During the cold war Ivan Arreguin-Toft had learned Russian while in the U.S. army. His duty included signal intelligence in Germany. We can be sure that he was also given the usual indoctrination lectures about the 'deviant Russian mind'. Since then he has dabbled in cyber-security which he is currently teaching somewhere. I find no evidence that he, at any time. has learned about history or sociology. The piece he delivered shows no such knowledge.
How all that qualifies him to make evidence free claims that Russia is extraordinary brutal is beyond me. Especially when his underlying theory is not based on historic facts but pure fiction.
What is most astonishing though is that there seems to be a market for such dreck.