RUSSIAN DEPRAVITY MUST BE PUNISHED

During the last almost three years in Ukraine, a war foisted on an innocent country by Vladimir Putin, it has become entirely and regrettably normal to have to listen to yet another war crime announced – universally by Russia on Ukrainians. The list already runs to an internationally confirmed 137,000 cases. These are legally definable and can be prosecuted as war crimes.

They include:

• POW Executions.
• Widespread kidnapping of underage children
• Forced enlistment
• Destruction of cultural and religious sites
• Destruction of environmentally important infrastructure (Novo Kokhovka Dam)
• Deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure, water treatment plants, electricity supplies, hospitals, education facilities, shops, apartment buildings.
• Torture and rape of civilians followed by illegal executions.
• The use of Chemical weapons
• Theft and Plunder

The list is huge, and if you add Syria to it, even more recent, because as the rebels came down from the north, what did the Russian Air Force do? It bombed nine hospitals in Idlib province. Not the rebels, not their forces, civilian hospitals.

This has all occurred under the watchful gaze of Vladimir Putin. He and his Syrian and Iranian allies have been responsible, as we are now finding out, for some of the most horrendous torture and brutality we have seen in this century. This hasn’t been carried out in the course of some existential war, but in an almost day to day fashion where oppression and summary arrest see humans locked up deep underground in torture chambers, sometimes for years. And much of it, it seems for little more than the sadistic brutality of the prison guards and administrators.

WAR CRIMES TRIALS

Despite calls for them, nothing happened after World War One. The person everyone wanted to land the trial on, somewhat unjustly was Kaiser Wilhelm-II, but it came to nothing.

That mistake was not made in World War Two. The Nazi leadership was mostly taken into custody, and charged with war crimes on a vast scale. One of the most ludicrous was ‘planning and waging offensive war’, which with the Soviets as members of the winning side, and who had certainly done the same thing in 1939-40, committing many war crimes in Poland especially, was conveniently forgotten. Let alone the fact countless US administrations could be accused of the same thing from Vietnam to Iraq.

What the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg showed the world was that these people could be and were charged with the crimes of the executions and mass murders of millions of people, the extermination camps and the slave labour that propped up the German economy. For that few survived 1946, some managed to kill themselves (Himmler & Goring) before being executed. Some escaped, with one being brought to justice in 1961 in Israel having hidden for years in Argentina, the notorious Adolf Eichmann.

Many more minor figures trials have taken place over the years, but it’s estimated that at least 10,000 men and women who participated in the holocaust were never brought to justice and never will be.

The war crimes trials in Tokyo had a different flavor, based more on military crimes, but they were none the less vital in ensuring justice was meted out to the worst of the perpetrators, but in many ways it was never as deep or through as Nuremberg.

It was years before war crimes tribunals were reformed, to deal with the Balkan conflicts and civil wars in Africa in the past 35 years. In many ways some of them have been outstanding in issuing justice, in others less so.

But the point is those evil men who did what they did were shown at last, not to be allowed to gain from the Impunity Syndrome; the state of mind where nobody really cares because they think in the end it won’t change or do anything to stop it happening again.

We cannot make that mistake this time.

PROSECUTING RUSSIAN WAR CRIMES

Russia is nuclear power as Putin reminds us every second day of the week. Its become so threadbare and worn out as statement its almost a joke. But not quite.

The sad reality is that it’s true, and that fact means that we will never be allowed to enter Russia to find and arrest the perpetrators of these crimes. And no Russian government is ever likely to cooperate, no matter its colour. Germany after 1955 protected many of its citizens by preventing extradition in its constitution.

Let us be clear that those involved in the crimes are many. A single Iskander strike on a shopping mall involves the following:

• A strategist who came up with the original concept
• A commander or commanders who decided to carry out the strategy at the highest levels
• The specialist who drew up the targeting list, knowing what it would be used for, even if it was just a guess.
• The officer who worked out the means of selecting which missile from which unit, the type of warhead, the target coordinates.
• The officer who entered the coordinates and fired the missile.

All of them are responsible and the argument ‘I was just following orders’ has no meaning. You must have had some idea what these orders were and what you were doing, what the result would be, and that they were, by their nature illegal. Ignorance of the law is not a defence.

Even if it is impossible to find every war criminal, or prosecute any of those responsible, it must be done in-absentia. If they are found guilty they must be barred from international travel and sanctions placed upon them so harshly they cannot leave Russia or its successor states for the rest of their lives without facing arrest and immediate imprisonment.

THE IMPUNITY SYNDROME

I don’t believe we have a choice. Even if we cannot get at them, their crimes must be publicized, their faces known, their lives exposed for what they are. Because we have entered too deeply a world where the Impunity Syndrome has reached a crescendo.

When politicians can commit multiple and egregious crimes and still be elected President of a major power, where the Teflon coating of invincibility hangs around politicians and leaders who say and do what they want for their own ends and nobody cares, we as a free people are in the wrong place. This is not what we stand for.

Ukraine is entitled to justice. Syria is entitled to justice. The African nations Russia is interfering in and causing mayhem to destabilize them and Europe, deserve justice. And frankly so do the people of Gaza, where Israel’s revenge has gone far too far.

If we do not demonstrate to tyrants and potential tyrants that they have and can go far too far, it will never stop. It won’t stop no matter what we do, it’s the human condition, somebody has to hurt somebody else. But we can make them think, we can perhaps, discourage such flagrant violations of basic decency. At least that surely, would be something? We have to start somewhere.

War is never a good thing. Von Clauswitz called it the extension of diplomacy by other means. He saw it as more or less inevitable at some point, because it’s what humans are and a natural state of our condition.

But there must be consequences. Attacking a neighbor for imperial ambition is not of this time, the weapons and means we have at our disposal are far too dangerous for that.

We have to start a process where we say enough is enough. Are we strong enough or do we really think the Age of Impunity is here to stay and we must simply accept the horrors rendered against us all? Have we become so jaded and accepting of the Impunity Syndrome that we no longer care?

Ukraine, Syria, et al, demand justice. They deserve it.

Military action can be conducted without resorting to barbarism. It isn’t easy. The concept of ethical warfare is almost nonsensical. Efficient warfare doesn’t have to destroy everything in its path. Yet I would tell any commander that there are no rules in war. You do what you must to win, because if you don’t they will. But that has to be tempered by some level of ethical considerations. Who decides what those are and when to apply them in a conflict as rapidly moving and so deliberately entwined with civilian populations?

These arguments become too complex. Would you as a commander be pressured to lose the entire war because of a handful of civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time? If you could destroy a city of 100,000 and yet save the lives of 5,000,000 and end the fighting by doing so? Does one justify the other? Apparently it does, as Hiroshima and Nagasaki prove.

There are no easy answers to ethics in war. They’re contradictory and situational, unique. But the behavior of individuals who go out of their way to harm others because they can, to destroy civilians simply because it makes the lives of others more unbearable or instills terror for the sake of terror? As Russia has done in Ukraine and Syria? That must be punished.

One way or another, justice must be done.

The Analyst

MilitaryAnalyst.bsky.social