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FT Reports A Ukrainian Warcrime
The willful killing of unarmed soldiers, especially when there is a good chance of taking them prisoners, is certainly a war crime.
It is astonishing that Christopher Miller of the Financial Times reports of it without further comment.
How Ukraine pulled off its biggest gamble: invading Russia (archived) – Financial Times, Aug 12, 2024
As Volodymyr prepared to enter Russian territory, adrenaline ran through his veins. It was not lost on him that 81 years ago, another battle in Russia’s Kursk region marked a turning point for Europe.
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“We entered Russian territory for the first time at 1pm on Tuesday [August 6],” Volodymyr said. “We were among the first to enter there.”
To his astonishment, his unit faced no resistance as their eight-wheeled, 20 tonne US Stryker fighting vehicle stormed across the border in broad daylight.
They soon encountered a Russian unit “sitting in the forest, drinking coffee at a table”, Volodymyr recalled. “Then our Stryker drives right into their table.
“We killed many of them on the first day,” he said. “Because they were unarmed and didn’t expect us.”
Not wanting to end up like their comrades, he added, “dozens” of stunned Russian soldiers simply laid down their weapons and surrendered.
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"81 years ago, another battle in Russia’s Kursk region marked a turning point for Europe," writes Miller. He and others should consider what that really means. If I remember correctly, the German fascists and their Ukrainian allies also committed war crimes – and lost the fight.
A response to rk’s post toward the end of the last Ukraine thread:
Other people are far from this stupidity level: “We don’t want escalation, and we don’t want war against NATO (…) But if they do, and it’ll start, well… we won’t have another choice. There will be no red lines. The line is the state border. As soon as they step on it, I say as a border guard, the answer will be instantaneous” Lukashenko said. More than 20 brigades are ready to prevent a border breakthrough from Ukraine ( topcor.ru/50582-belarus-gotova-zadejstvovat-bolee-20-brigad-u-granicy-s-ukrainoj-lukashenko.html )
Posted by: rk | Aug 15 2024 14:49 utc | 1063
I’ve long thought that a real union* between Belarus and Russia would be a great thing, as long as it would be Belarus absorbing Russia, and not the other way around. (Sort of like the reverse take-over of Boeing by McDonnell-Douglas, only once again in reverse, because it would be the incompetent and corrupt being thrown out, instead of the other way around.) Lukashenko is not the only example, it seems to go for the whole state apparatus and society: From the military, the heavy industry, the culture, everything seems to have retained the best from the old USSR while moving forward where required.
While Belarus is obviously not the military power Russia is, there’s more reason to believe that what’s supposed to be there is actually there, and that the general staff isn’t just composed of grifters like Shoigu and Gerasimov. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that China has shown a consistent preference for investing in Belarus over Russia, and relations with Iran haven’t been regularly interrupted by sudden outbursts of philo-Semitism and (comically extreme and maudlin, at times) pro-Israel sentiment as with Putin.
Now Belarus obviously avoided much of the privatization and the emergence of an oligarch class, but most importantly, there seems to be a lot of truth to the old Western trope that the Kremlin, in particular since Putin took power, has been a sort of theatre state (with many similarities with the garbage Berlusconi brought to Italian TV). Constant, repeated announcements of projects (how many times has the MiG-41 been annonced and re-announced, or the izdeliye 30 engine for the Su-57, the resumption of Il-96 production, the PAK DA, the “Slon” all-Russian successor the An-124, the Il-276, the Moscow-Kazan and other high-speed railways, the revival of the Energia rocket, and years and decades go without even an explanation of the delays), parades and military drills, but all just for show and to keep up the pretense that things are happening behind the scenes.
The Aurus Senat limousine for Putin himself was brought to fruition but the development of an actual indigenous Russian automotive industry – regular cars for regular people – has gone absolutely nowhere since sanctions were introduced in 2014 (and before). Even Iran, under much heavier sanctions for much longer and with much more limited resources, has finally reached the goal of a fully domestic automobile platform, while Russia is light-years away from that.
Lukashenko, although bombastic in style, is a real leader with real red lines. He seems to be more similar to Erdogan in that he (pre-2021, when the West attempted its color revolution) used to try to play both sides, in the (at least perceived) interest of his own country, but just like Erdogan, he does not seem to crave the acceptance and love of the West’s elites and does not seem to have looked back at all since the West showed their true intentions toward his government.
I have never seen him bluff (as in make a promise or threat he then pretends he never made), while over the last 10 years I’ve probably seen/heard Putin and his government bluff literally hundreds of times. (Even though, bizarrely, I’ve seen the literal phrase “Putin doesn’t bluff” recur as a kind of meme.)
With all this said, I don’t believe for a second that Putin is a bought traitor, even if he was hand-picked by Yeltsin. To be honest, I don’t think Yeltsin was a paid agent of influence (that would give him far too much credit – Gorbachev is another matter though), just a subhuman, pathetic, moronic drunk. (Clinton was right to laugh at his expensive in public.) Putin is, in my estimation, just an extremely flawed, naive, misguided and weak leader, who, unfortunately like Merkel (there as many parallels, including their personalities and approaches to government) has cleared the field of promising successors (aka. rivals).
Like I’ve heard someone (it might have been Eric Striker) point out already, I think the best cause for optimism in Russia’s future is the many hundreds of thousands of young veterans who will one day return from the war and who will have zero tolerance for the corruption, incompetence and sheer laziness in the Russian state. I hope they will be as ruthless in exterminating it and those who were responsible for it as the Bolsheviks once were.
*Instead of Putin’s “Union State”, that, like everything else he says, he announces two or three times a year as a done deal and then 10 years later it still hasn’t happened. The thought just struck me that he might not just from autism but from some form of amnesia. It would be one of the less ominous explanations for behavior, to be honest.
Posted by: Unnamed | Aug 15 2024 17:29 utc | 182
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