A photo taken in Butcha, Ukraine, a suburb of Kiev, shows a woman in the backyard of her home with her hand covering her mouth in a gesture of horror at the bodies of three civilians strewn in front of her. When Aset Chad saw that photo, he started to shake and went back 22 years in time.
In February 2000, Chad entered his neighbor’s backyard in Chechnya and saw the bodies of three men and a woman shot multiple times in front of his eight-year-old daughter. Russian soldiers had invaded his village and murdered at least 60 people, raped at least six women and knocked out their victims’ gold teeth, human rights observers discovered.
Interviewed by phone in New York, where she now resides, Chad said: “I’ve been having terrible flashbacks. I see exactly what’s happening. I see the same military, the same Russian tactics they use, dehumanizing people.”
The brutality of Moscow’s war in Ukraine takes two distinct forms that are recognized by people who have seen the Russian military in action elsewhere.
There is the programmatic violence inflicted by Russian bombs and missiles against civilian as well as military targets, whose purpose is both to defeat and to demoralize. These attacks are reminiscent of the aerial destruction of the Chechen capital, Grozny, in 1999 and 2000, and then, in 2016, of the Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo.
But there is also the cruelty of individual soldiers and units. Butcha’s horrors seem descended directly from the slaughter of the village where Chad lived, Novie Aldi, a generation ago.
The deaths and crimes committed by soldiers are one of the elements present in all wars, including those fought by the US in recent decades in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
It has always been difficult to explain why soldiers commit atrocities or to describe how commanders’ orders, military culture, national propaganda, battlefield frustration, and individual perversity can all add up to produce such horrors.
In Russia, however, acts like these are rarely investigated or even acknowledged, let alone punished. Given this, it is unclear to what extent the brutality of soldiers derives from commanders’ intent or whether commanders do not properly control their troops.
When this is added to the apparent strategy of bombing civilian targets, many observers conclude that the Russian government — and possibly parts of Russian society as well — actually condone or even condone violence against civilians.
Some analysts see the problem as structural and political, with the Russian military’s lack of accountability amplified by the absence of independent institutions in Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian system or the Soviet Union that preceded him. Compared to the West, fewer people harbor any illusions that individual rights should be worth more than raw power.
“I think there is a kind of culture of violence,” said Ukrainian philosopher Volodymir Iermolenko. “Either you dominate or you are dominated.” In Ukraine, it seems, Russian soldiers can continue to kill civilians with impunity. This view is reinforced by the fact that virtually none of the perpetrators of war crimes in Chechnya, where the Kremlin crushed an independence movement at the cost of tens of thousands of civilian lives, has been brought to justice in Russia.
At that time, Russian investigators told Chad that the murders in Novie Aldi could have been committed by Chechens dressed as Russian soldiers, she recalls. Today the Kremlin alleges that any atrocities committed in Ukraine are either staged or perpetrated by Ukrainians and their Western “patrons”. At the same time, it denounces as “Nazi” those who resist the Russian advance.
Many Russians believe these lies, and those who do not believe in vain try to understand how these crimes could be committed in their name. Violence is still common in the Russian Armed Forces, where more senior soldiers routinely mistreat more juniors.
Despite two decades of efforts to convert the Army into a more professional force, it has never developed a strong intermediate level comparable to the noncommissioned officers in the US military who serve as a bridge between commanders and lower-level soldiers. In 2019, in Siberia, a foot soldier opened fire on his military base and killed eight colleagues. He later stated that he committed the slaughter because other soldiers had made his life hell.
Experts say hazing in the Russian Armed Forces is lighter today than it was in the early 2000s, when it killed dozens of recruits every year. But they also say that in many units order is still maintained with informal systems similar to the abusive hierarchies of Russian prisons.
For Sergei Krivenko, who runs a human rights organization that provides legal assistance to Russian soldiers, this violence, combined with a lack of independent monitoring, increases the possibility of war crimes being committed. For him, Russian soldiers are just as capable of committing cruelty against other Russians as they are against Ukrainians.
“It is the state of the Russian army, this impunity, aggression and internal violence, that is expressed in these conditions,” Krivenko said. “If there was an insurrection in Voronezh” – a city in western Russia – “and the army was called to intervene, the soldiers would behave exactly the same way.”
But it is also possible that the crimes in Ukraine stem from years of dehumanizing Kremlin propaganda against Ukrainians, which soldiers attend in mandatory sessions. As a sample of programming available on the Russian Ministry of Defense website reveals, recruits are required to watch “informative TV programs” from 9 pm to 9:40 pm every day except Sunday.
Russian reports reveal that the message that the Russians are now fighting “Nazis” – as their ancestors did in World War II – is being spread among the Armed Forces.
In a video distributed by the Ministry of Defense, Major Aleksei Shabulin claims that his grandfather “chased fascist scum in the forests” during and after World War II, referring to Ukrainian independence fighters who at one time collaborated with Nazi Germany. “I’m taking this tradition gloriously forward,” says Shabulin. “I will not shame my great-grandfather. I will go all the way.”
This propaganda also prepared Russian soldiers not to anticipate much resistance to the invasion – after all, according to the Kremlin’s narrative, the Ukrainians had been subjugated by the West and were waiting to be freed by their Russian brothers. Krivenko, the soldiers’ rights advocate, said he spoke directly to a Russian soldier who called his organization’s number and reported that even when his unit was ordered to leave Belarus and invade Ukraine, it was not made clear that the soldiers were about to enter a war zone.
According to Krivenko, military commanders basically treat the army as if it were a herd of cattle. Putin went so far as to say that only contract soldiers would fight in Ukraine, but his Defense Ministry was forced to admit that also recruits – who complete a year of compulsory military service in Russia for all men between the ages of 18 and 27 – were sent to the front. .
The Ukrainians resisted the Russians, though Putin said in an essay published last year that the Defense Ministry had made it mandatory reading for soldiers, that Ukrainians and Russians are “one nation”. According to Mark Galeotti, a scholar of Russian security issues, the fierce resistance of a people considered to be part of the Russian people itself contributed to the view that Ukrainians are worse than usual opponents on the battlefield. “The fact that ordinary Ukrainian citizens are taking up arms against the Russians creates the impression that they are not just enemies – they are traitors.”
And treason, Putin has said, “is the most serious crime of all.”
Russian military violence against civilians is to some extent a characteristic of the Russian military, not an exceptional occurrence. In Syria, Russia has attacked hospitals to quell the last pockets of resistance to President Bashar al-Assad — a “brutally pragmatic approach to war” that has “its own hideous logic,” Galeotti said. It was an echo of Russia’s aerial destruction of Grozny in 1999 and 2000 and a prelude to the ferocious siege of Mariupol, in the invasion now underway.
Point-blank murders of civilians and sexual violence committed by individual soldiers are a separate issue. In Butcha, civilians told the New York Times that the mood and behavior of Russian soldiers grew more brutal as the war progressed and that the first soldiers to arrive were relatively peaceful. “You’ve got a bunch of sleep-deprived, gun-toting boys who think no rules apply to them,” Galeotti said.
The violence is prompting scholars to reassess their view of the Russian army. In a military operation that appeared, at least initially, to be aimed at winning the Ukrainians’ loyalty to Moscow, atrocities against civilians appear to be tremendously counterproductive. Russia has already witnessed this in Chechnya, where violence against civilians has fueled the Chechen resistance.
“Every civilian killed meant a bullet fired at a Russian soldier,” said Kiril Shamiev, who studies Russian civil-military relations at the Central European University in Vienna.
“I thought they had learned some lessons.”
