What more can Russia Do

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 Rob Exile Ward 30 Jul 2022

It seems that they are now embracing Nazi levels of institutionalised sadism, brutality and murder - all the while throwing their own young into the meat grinder, and abandoning any pretence of respect for international law. 

It's very hard to see what we can do, other than provide increased support to Ukraine (materiel, training, intelligence) and suck up the inevitable short term consequences for our own prosperity and comfort. 

Post edited at 14:54
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In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

> It seems that they are now embracing Nazi levels of institutionalised sadism, brutality and murder

I think Stalinist might be more appropriate; Putin seems to be following that model internally and externally.

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 ian caton 30 Jul 2022
In reply to captain paranoia:

It seems thia was a strategy used by others in days gone by to discourage their own soldiers from surrendering for fear of reprisals. Sick. 

 elsewhere 30 Jul 2022
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

Supply Ukraine with a batch of the longer range rockets for HIMARS every time the Russians sink to a new low.

I think ITN coverage of emaciated prisoners in concentration camps stiffened European and NATO resolve to act in Bosnia. This should have a similar effect. Although most people will avoid watching it, so maybe not.

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In reply to elsewhere:

I won't watch the video of a PoW being castrated, so I have some sympathy. But there has to be a reckoning.

 broken spectre 30 Jul 2022
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

The reason these psychopaths are getting away with it is because they're a nuclear power; there is only so much history can teach us - I'm not aware of a major nuclear power going so rotten in the past. I would like to think that good wins out but these are dark times indeed.

 elsewhere 30 Jul 2022
In reply to broken spectre:

Dark times, but a non-nuclear armed, LGBT+ friendly (relatively?), degenerate democracy led by a Jewish comic (ie everything the Russian fascists despise) is proving more resilient than Putin expected.

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 wintertree 30 Jul 2022
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

What more?

European nations (including the U.K.) aren’t yet at each other’s necks over energy.  That seems like a strategic outcome Putin is after.  He’s drip feeding the cuts, another one today.  Keep NATO states and other European nations paying for the atrocities, don’t let them recharge reserves, get ready for the final cutoff when the first cold spell lands on November/December.  See which nation turns its back on Ukraine first to avert their energy crisis and watch Europe turn on itself.

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 Billhook 30 Jul 2022
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

https://www.newsweek.com/ukrainian-medic-apologizes-after-saying-russian-po...

Hopefully his staff didn't carry out his instructions.

 fred99 31 Jul 2022
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

> It seems that they are now embracing Nazi levels of institutionalised sadism, brutality and murder ...

When the Nazis went into that part of Poland they let the Soviets invade after they had invaded the western part (and started WW2), they were shocked to find what the Soviets had done to the intelligentsia, political, and officer class of Poland (amongst others).

The fact that even the Nazis were shocked at what the Soviets had done should indicate what the Soviets have been doing to anyone they dislike ever since they got power.

It's about time anyone espousing the Soviet system or Stalinism was regarded in the same way as Nazis - after all, there is really no difference.

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 Kalna_kaza 31 Jul 2022
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

The west can keep providing enough long range weapons to bleed Russian armed forces until either a) a retreat is called or b) Russia finally declares a war and starts to draft young men from relatively prosperous cities and regions. 

Pretty sure that public opinion will noise dive when it's European Russians getting killed rather than ethnic minorities from far flung regions. 

Option C is the nuclear option but you would hope the Russian military, what's left of it, would mutiny against such an order.

 henwardian 31 Jul 2022
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

I assume the Russians did something today or yesterday to precipitate this thread. Any chance of a link? Without giving any context it just looks like a random rant, I assume that others in the thread know what it's about from their replies but none of them linked either.

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 65 31 Jul 2022
In reply to henwardian:

What appears to be a fairly believable account and video of Russian/Chechen soldiers castrating a Ukrainian prisoner for fun. This is at Daesh levels of bestial atrocities.

I can't help but think that some upsetting should be getting done on Chechen soil, with big heads being toppled. Russian too, but of course that is a whole lot riskier. For upsetting, read terrorism against the state. 

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In reply to elsewhere:

Is there a link to a non-Express article? I refuse on principle to give clicks to such a rag.

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 henwardian 31 Jul 2022
In reply to 65:

Great.

Makes me wish I hadn't been dumb enough to ask.

It sounds like more of the same tbh. Arguably worse than other examples that have been seen thus far of forces on the Russian side carrying out varying war crimes but, well, you know that phrase "I'm not surprised, just dissapointed", that's pretty much where I'm at. People do terrible things in war, no matter how well trained they are and by all accounts the mixture of Ukranian rebels, conscripts, reservists, mercenaries and regular soldiers fighting on the Russian side have extremely varied levels of training so a certain percentage going completely off the reservation is to be expected. Depressingly.

If you train a man to mutilate and kill his fellow man, how surprised exactly can you be when he mutilates and kills his fellow men?

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 TobyA 31 Jul 2022
In reply to 65:

> What appears to be a fairly believable account and video of Russian/Chechen soldiers castrating a Ukrainian prisoner for fun.. 

The reports have him as being in Kadyrov's forces but interestingly he doesn't look Chechen at all, rather from somewhere much further east. Interestingly the unit that it seems committed many of the war crimes in Butcha were from SE Siberia - oddly a mainly Buddhist Asian ethnic group,

In reply to henwardian:

Sorry - that's relativist cr*p. Soldiers AREN'T routinely trained to torture and mutilate. Of course things get out of hand in hot blood; this doesn't seem too have been. 

 wintertree 31 Jul 2022
In reply to henwardian:

> If you train a man to mutilate and kill his fellow man, how surprised exactly can you be when he mutilates and kills his fellow men

Given the vast scale of abuse perpetrated by the Russian troops, I rather suggest the problem is that they're being trained - or at least strongly encouraged - to abuse civilians and POWs, and that this lies at the basis of what we're seeing.  

Human Rights Watch have some pieces on the experience of Russian conscripts. Given the scale of their abuse at the hands of more senior troops, it's hard to see it as anything but a deliberate process to take near-children from their parents and turn them into indiscriminate perpetrators of atrocities.

https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/russia1004/5.htm

Post edited at 18:56
 65 31 Jul 2022
In reply to TobyA:

I think it is likely that Kadyrov's forces will contain more than a few bad 'uns from further east, who can't stay in Afghanistan or go home to Uzbekistan etc.

Edit: not that I've seen him, I'm not going to watching the video. Reading about it was depressing enough.

Post edited at 19:56
 TobyA 31 Jul 2022
In reply to 65:

I've seen the other video on RT which Bellingcat and others identified him from. I haven't seen the torture video either.

 henwardian 31 Jul 2022
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

> Sorry - that's relativist cr*p. Soldiers AREN'T routinely trained to torture and mutilate. Of course things get out of hand in hot blood; this doesn't seem too have been. 

I didn't mention torture.

I said "mutilate" and "kill", both of which are accurate words to describe the effect of modern weapons on humans.

You only have to look at USA torture and murder of detainees in Afghanistan and in Iraq, Israeli killing of little children throwing stones and the recent claims of UK special forces having a competition to see how many people they were supposed to be arresting they could kill to see that the idea you can have a military that acts within the rules at all times is a myth, no matter how well they are trained.

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In reply to fred99:

I’m not sure about that. The book I’m reading (Bloodlands, by Yale historian Timothy Snyder), suggests that the Nazis carried on the work enthusiastically.

That book, among some other remarkable stats, suggests that a Jew entering the Nazi camps had a better chance of survival than a Russian POW captured by the Nazis, which puts their own attitude to POWs in a certain historical perspective.

jcm

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 guffers_hump 01 Aug 2022
In reply to fred99:

So shocked in fact that they went around exterminating all the Jews, Gypsies, Communists and disabled amongst others then decided the standard Polish population were to be exterminated also.

3 million Jews were killed in Poland, which if I'm not mistaken is half of all Jews killed in total.

In total 6 million Poles were murdered by the Nazis.

Approximately 600 Polish citizens died over the years 1945-1993 in crimes or accidents for which the Soviet soldiers were responsible.

To compare the 2 is disingenuous to the people who were persecuted by the Nazis. 

Post edited at 10:50
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 fred99 01 Aug 2022
In reply to guffers_hump:

I'm just saying that the Soviets/Stalinists were acting that way before the Nazis came to power, continued during the war, and have basically never stopped doing it - except (probably) for when Gorbachev or Yeltsin were in power.

Russians/Soviets/Stalinists have been killing Jews going back to the 19th century and beyond. Not a nice bunch at all.

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In reply to guffers_hump:

> To compare the 2 is disingenuous to the people who were persecuted by the Nazis. 

Probably worth looking into 'the Terror' of Stalin's reign. He killed tens of millions of his own people, including members of his own family.

It's not a game of Dictator Top Trumps, though; Nazism and Stalinism were both hideous.

2
 Billhook 01 Aug 2022
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

Perhaps It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.

The Russian troops raped their way through Germany in  WW2 and burnt whole villages to the ground. Details are not widely known I think.   We only know lots of details about the German atrocities because we occupied Germany.  We didn't occupy Russia then and we certainly will not be able to occupy Russia when the Ukraine/Russian war ends.  So they'll be no war crimes trials (unfortunately).

Post WW2 the Russians kept thousands of German, Italian & Japanese POWs captive working in slave labour camps where many thousands died before most (not all) were realised in the 1950s.  There were still German POWs from the WW1 being kept by the Russians and who never were able to return*  (*As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me, by J M Bauer)

Then of course there are the many post war Russian 'special operations' carried out in places like Syria, Afghanistan,  Georgia and so on, all of which were carried out with cruelty and wanton killing and torture on all sides. (There was a video on U-Tube at the time of three Russian soldiers captured in Georgia, being beaten,  taunted and then having their throats  cut and left to slowly die whilst their death was being filmed).  

 guffers_hump 01 Aug 2022
In reply to fred99:

What your saying is false. You are comparing Mass genocide to persecution.

The Tsar's would run Pogroms on the Jews until the Bolshevik revolution. When it was stopped.

Stalin and Brezhnev were anti-Semitic in politics and against their political opponents but were still incomparable to what the Nazis did, especially in the small amount of time they (the Nazis) had to do it.

A quote from the Jerusalem Post

'The “Jews in the Red Army” project contains the biographies of several hundred Jewish soldiers, many of whom received formal recognition as Heroes of the Soviet Union. The information gathered is drawn from many sources, including memoirs, diaries, letters, military reports and medal recommendations. The biographies relate their prewar experiences as members of the intelligentsia, career military officers, or factory workers, and their postwar memoirs.'

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/holocaust-remembrance-in-the-occupied-uss...

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 guffers_hump 01 Aug 2022
In reply to captain paranoia:

The Great Purge is what I assume you are referring to and generous estimates on deaths are 1.2 million but more likely to be around 700,000.

If you are referring to the Black Book of Communisms number on people killed in the Soviet Union. They count all the deaths on the Eastern front as deaths due to communism.

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 orejas 01 Aug 2022
In reply to guffers_hump:

You cleverly picked 1945 -1993, excluding 1939-1940 and the Katyn massacre for example. Ask Ukranians about the Holodomor. One can only say both Hitler and Stalin were equally hideous, hard to say who is worse if we are arguing whether 6m is worse than 3m deaths or 40 worse than 20m. 

 FactorXXX 01 Aug 2022
In reply to guffers_hump:

Are you Shona of the South?

 elsewhere 01 Aug 2022
In reply to orejas:

The Bloodlands book by Timothy Snyder mentioned above is very very good. It's relentlessly bleak and throughout in the back of your mind you know it gets much worse

A long time since I read it but my recollection is that Stalin made Hitler look like an amateur until Operation Barbarossa. Then I think Hitler made Stalin look like an amateur.

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 fred99 01 Aug 2022
In reply to guffers_hump:

Hello "Comrade".

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 guffers_hump 01 Aug 2022
In reply to elsewhere:

https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-revue-d-histoire-moderne-et-contemporain...

This article is an interesting read if you've read Bloodlines and Black Earth.


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