If Putin’s objective is to unify Russia, Belarus and Ukraine into one Slavic bloc, why is Russia killing Ukrainian civilians? That’s a strange approach if Putin intends to make Ukrainians part of his Russian empire. Couldn’t regime change have been achieved through a more tactical approach? Can someone explain what Putin is thinking?
By my reading Putin thought his invaders would be welcomed by most Ukrainians, and the ones who resisted would be disorganized and weak. He also thought his military was much more powerful and effective than it turned out to be. So his original strategy failed, and it looks like he doesn’t have the power to actually occupy and put down a resisting Ukraine (in the way the US tried to do with Iraq), so because he’s an atrocious human being unwilling to back down, the only strategy left is to demolish cities from afar in an attempt to demoralize and terrorize the population into surrendering.
Russia has targeted civilians in all their recent wars. It seems to be a part of their military strategy.
It’s completely backwards from NATO’s approach of minimizing civilian deaths. Laser guided missiles used in Iraq targeted a specific window and offices. The Russians would just blowup the entire building.
The use of brutal force against noncombatants has been seen previously in the Chechen Wars (by both sides, to be clear) and is generally what you would expect when you send a poorly trained, largely conscript force into a war zone and tell them to take their assigned objectives or else (the “or else” being imprisoned or shot, as many captured soldiers report will happen if they are returned to Russia). The whole appeal to a unified pan-Slavic nation is about as much bullshit as claiming that they are invading to denazify Ukraine; what Putin wants is a buffer zone against NATO, access to Ukraine’s natural resources, and a return to some prestige (Putin has an election in 2024 and while the outcome is already determined he’d prefer to have the same public approval as he did circa 2012).
Of course, Putin expected Ukraine to fall before the numerical superiority of the mighty Russian Army, but he failed to account for the poor actual state of Russian logistics and maintenance, the effects of Rasputitsa (the infamous “mud season” of late fall and early spring), and the cultural memory that Ukrainians have about how they were treated the last time they were under Russian autocracy, i.e. the planned famines of the Holodomor. Now his soldiers are stuck (some of them literally), without heat and running low on supplies, and know they can’t just turn around and walk back to Russia, so they are desperate to achieve anything regardless of the vagaries of international law about which they are probably ill-informed anyway.
Stranger
Kind of the same reason the Japanese abused non-Japanese in their so-called Co-prosperity Sphere (or whatever BS term they were using) and the Russians were the ones really in control of the Soviet Union. It’s nonsense. It’s all about Russian control.
Because the desire to “unite greater Russia” is Putin’s power fantasy. He sees it as an affront that what belonged to Russia was taken from him. It was never about the people.
I mean, they’re the ones who “betrayed Russia,” trying to join NATO. And, according to one guy from Russia I talked to, Ukraine is supposedly always been out to harm Russia ever since the fall of the USSR. This is as much about vengeance as anything.
Targeting and killing civilians has been a US strategy in many modern wars. For example, WWII, Vietnam, and N Korea. I think the reasoning was it would bring a quicker end to the war and save soldiers lives on both sides. Like the two atom bombs over Japan.
“American Bombing of Civilians since 1945”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvggx2r2.13?seq=5
‘What hardly any Americans know or remember’, argues the American historian Bruce Cumings:
is that we carpet bombed the North for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties. [The] air assaults ranged from the widespread and continual use of fire-bombing (mainly with napalm) to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapon, finally to the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the last stages of the war." Cumings goes on to argue that the air war on Korean civilians
was an extension of the air campaigns against Germany and Japan during the Second World War, but in contrast to those urbanindustrial societies, North Korea was an agrarian third world country".
First Russian soldiers seems to be mainly conscripts with little management (sub officers and the like) that will kill anybody that appears vaguely threatening (as a guy in camo pants, even if with a load of potatoes in his hands or someone with a phone)
Second, they had killed people marching or cycling in the streets so maybe a little trigger happy.
Third, they had rounded up and sequestrated civilians in cellar for weeks, with no water, food or heating so seems to be a deliberate order…
Fourth, in one of the liberated village, seems the Russian officer in command (captain) did not applied orders to harass civilians and apologized to the inhabitants. So definitely deliberate orders.
Fiftieth, the bombing of civilian facilities, hospitals and malls for weeks indicate a clear intent in killing/chasing the Ukrainians at the highest level. So the official stance of “unifying the Slavs” does not stand well face the reality of " Kill them all and then advance on a field of ruins" that is the Russian procedure in Syria, Armenia, Tchetchenya,…
They’re not trying to win votes or “hearts and minds”, just acquiescence through terror. After all, the story is that anti-Russian sentiment is driven by Nazis, therefore, just about anyone they come across might be one too. It’s rather reminiscent of Franco’s admission in the Spanish Civil War (though granted, he was in the much stronger position) that he wanted to take his time consolidating rather than advancing so as to ensure that as many “Reds” - civilian as well as military - as possible were killed.
Plus, the reports of wholesale looting indicate that at best there is widespread indiscipline among individual Russian soldiers, and no doubt frustration that the people they were supposed to be “liberating” neither want nor need them to.