Russian occupiers found a world different from theirs, so they smashed it
War in general is an atrocity. But zoom in from 30,000 feet and it gets personal. Nobody comes out untainted by reducing enemies and civilians to bone and ash. The Iraq invasion and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib set me on the path that led me here.
Treat tales of atrocities with a degee of skepticism, propaganda always being a feature of war. So much arrives as anecdotes.
Somewhere I heard that when Red Army troops occupied Berlin in WWII, they sent in uneducated troops from Central Asia among the occupiers to humiliate the master race. They’d gather wristwatches and wear several. They couldn’t tell time, the story went. They just liked the sound of the ticking. (Take with a grain of salt.)
If only that was the least of it.
So today arrive more tales of Russian Army actions better documented than that anecdote (CNN):
The Russian government is operating an expansive network of dozens of camps where it has held thousands of Ukrainian children since the start of the war against Ukraine last year, according to a new report released Tuesday.
The report contains disturbing new details about the extent of Moscow’s efforts to relocate, re-educate, and sometimes militarily train or forcibly adopt out Ukrainian children – actions that constitute war crimes and could provide evidence that Russia’s actions amount to genocide, it said.
The report was produced as a part of the work of the US State Department-backed Conflict Observatory by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. The Observatory was established last year to gather evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
The total number of children involved exceeds 6,000 detained in 43 identified facilities stretching across Russia from Crimea east to the Pacific Ocean.
“The primary purpose of the camps appears to be political reeducation,” he said, noting that at least 32 of the facilities identified in the report “appear to be engaged in systematic re-education efforts that expose children from Ukraine to Russia-centric academic, cultural, patriotic, and in two cases, specifically military education.”
Russia’s embassy in Washington dismissed the report as “absurd,” and accused the US of being complicit in the alleged deaths of children in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.
The Atlantic offers more. Except inside occupied Ukraine the political reeducation project seems haphazard and pro-forma. Just as the Stalin’s army did in Poland, write Anne Applebaum and Nataliya Gumenyuk, Vladimir Putin’s troops arrived with lists of people to arrest, including Viktor Marunyak, the mayor of Stara Zburjivka. His captors seemed as clueless as the watch-collectors before them. “They took no notes,” the pair explain. “Their questioning was sloppy; [Marunyak] could not work out what they actually wanted to learn.”
“Because Marunyak fit into no category that the Russians could recognize—perhaps even because his local patriotism and his civic-mindedness seemed strange to them—they decided he must be a secret member of a Ukrainian ‘sabotage group.’ He was not,” the pair write.
Marunyak was arrested, beaten, and tortured with electric shocks for days:
Over the past 10 months, the Reckoning Project has deployed more than a dozen journalists and field researchers to record detailed testimonies of victims of and witnesses to atrocities in areas of Ukraine that are or were under Russian occupation. Lawyers and analysts then seek to verify these accounts, with the goal of providing evidence that will be admissible in future court proceedings. The organization has found that Marunyak’s experience was not unusual. Oleh Yakhniyenko, the mayor of Mylove, another village in the Kherson region, was detained twice. Olena Peleshok, the mayor of Zeleny Pod, was imprisoned for more than two months. Mykhailo Burak, the mayor of Bekhtery village, was detained and tortured. In the formerly occupied territory of Kharkiv alone, police investigators have evidence of 25 torture chambers. The Ukrainian government believes that mayors, deputy mayors, and other local leaders from a majority of the Kherson region’s 49 municipalities were arrested or kidnapped. Some have simply disappeared.
Many of their stories share not only gruesome details but also an atmosphere of unreality. Ukrainian captives were told that the Ukrainian state had discriminated against them for speaking Russian; now they were “free,” the invaders insisted. But when Russian-speaking mayors and other elected officials flatly explained that no one in Ukraine had harmed them for using their native language, or that Russian was widely spoken in the region, the soldiers didn’t have any response. Dmytro Vasyliev, the secretary of the city council of occupied Nova Kakhovka, recalled that his Russian was more fluent and more grammatical than the Russian of the soldier interrogating him. The soldier was a Kalmyk, one of Russia’s minority groups; Vasyliev had been born in Moscow. He considered himself a Ukrainian of ethnic Russian extraction, which confused them: “They couldn’t comprehend why I, Russian by ethnic origin, did not want to cooperate with them,” Vasyliev recalled. “I said, ‘How can I look into the eyes of my son, my colleagues, if I become a traitor?’ They just didn’t get it.” Since his interview with the Reckoning Project, Vasyliev has died.
Neither do Putin’s troops seem capable of grasping simple, civic-mindedness, much less local self-governance: “Anyone who conducts any independent activity—anyone who engages with civil society or who might be described as a social entrepreneur—is at risk in an occupation zone run by men who may have never encountered a genuine charity or a genuine volunteer organization before at all.”
It seems all rather Trumpian, or maybe DeSantis-ist. A few schools are reopened, told to Russify, and to organize political celebrations that mirror those in Russia. Not much happens. Occupation troops are going through the motions to put on a show for Moscow.
“I am following their activities,” says Marunyak who eventually escaped the area. “They are all done for a camera shot in Russia. Even people who live in the occupation don’t believe it is for real. It’s like a huge Potemkin village. It can’t function. They try to glue it together, but it doesn’t work.”
Failure and incompetence lead to violence; violence creates more resistance; and resistance, so hard for the invaders to comprehend, creates wider, broader, ever more random destruction, pain, and suffering. This is the logic of genocide, and it is unfolding right now, in our time, in the occupied Ukrainian territories that have not yet been liberated, in the towns where Russian soldiers still arrest people arbitrarily on the street, in the villages where the Ukrainian state cannot yet count the torture chambers, let alone shut them down.
But arresting and torturing people for no particular reason is the protocol, if the Reckoning Project is to be believed. So they do it. They might have collected watches instead.