Drone video recorded by Ukrainian forces during the occupation of Bucha, Ukraine shows a civilian fired upon by a pair of Russian armored vehicles:
The video shows a cyclist moving along a street in Bucha, dismounting and walking a bicycle around the corner onto a street occupied by Russian soldiers. As soon as the cyclist rounds the turn, a Russian armored vehicle fires several high-caliber rounds along the thoroughfare. A second armored vehicle fires two rounds in the direction of the cyclist. A plume of dust and smoke rises from the scene.
The video is aerial footage recorded by Ukraine’s military in early March when Russian forces still held the town. It has been independently verified by The New York Times.
Weeks later, after Russia withdrew from Bucha, a body in civilian clothes was filmed beside a bicycle in this precise location in a second video verified by The Times. The body, with one leg mangled, lies behind a concrete utility pillar that has collapsed from an apparent strike. The damage to the pillar is consistent with high-caliber ammunition. The person’s clothing — a dark blue top and lighter pants — matches the cyclist’s attire.
By now such atrocities are familiar. Russian strategy may be to terrorize civilians into submission. Andrew Exum, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East under Barack Obama, considers why discipline among Russian forces fell apart or was never there to start (The Atlantic). That may be more a factor behind war crimes than a formal strategy:
What we are seeing is likely something much more familiar, and much more universal: These sorts of crimes occur when military organizations are committed into combat without clear, achievable objectives, and without a professional noncommissioned-officer corps to enforce discipline within the ranks. They are what happens when military organizations are not held to account for their actions; when soldiers, after seeing the deaths of their friends in the face of unforeseen resistance, resort to savagery; and when the guardrails to prevent such a descent into inhumanity are absent.
In retrospect, looking back on two decades of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is remarkable how few crimes U.S. troops committed against civilian populations. Civilians in both countries suffered greatly, make no mistake, but the incidence of tactical units committing heinous crimes was lower, despite the duration of those wars, than that among Russian troops in a few weeks in Ukraine.
There are several reasons for that disparity. First, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps are mostly led, at the tactical level, by a professional noncommissioned-officer corps—something Russia’s army largely lacks. I asked a friend who led a brigade in Baghdad during the surge of 2007 why we did not see more war crimes then, despite the intensity of the combat. “That’s all down to the junior officers and noncommissioned officers who led the infantry platoons and squads,” he replied. “Those young men didn’t allow it.”
Not that American troops never commit war crimes. But when they do (and they have), professionalism instilled among even the lower ranks means there is a fair chance they will be prosecuted by the military justice system, as were Clint Lorance and Eddie Gallagher. They were turned in by their own men.
Some have claimed the Russian atrocities are born from Russian culture itself. But this is “inaccurate and perhaps even bigoted,” Exum says, arguing “Russia’s military culture and organization is to blame for the crimes in Ukraine.” That culture has persisted for decades through multiple Russian conflicts.
As disturbing as Lorance’s and Gallagher’s crimes is seeing Americans and a former chief executive cheer them on:
Our military’s culture of accountability took a blow when then-President Donald Trump pardoned both Lorance and Gallagher and was then cheered on by a morally loathsome minority of veterans and military fanboys who elected to side with Lorance and Gallagher against the many others in uniform who had testified against each man.
“Morally loathsome” recalls a phrase from 2016 used then to describe people who would drape themselves in American symbols while scorning American principles, who would hold aloft their pocket Constitutions while rejecting democracy, and who would call for public hangings of officials and casually traffic in “pre-genocide talk.”
How many still cheer on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as the avatar of an authoritarian-led, white-Christian, one-party state they hope will overthrow the republic Benjamin Franklin warned we might not be able to keep?
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