Opinion: The atrocities in Bucha are no aberration. This is the Russian way of war.

 

Opinion: The atrocities in Bucha are no aberration. This is the Russian way of war.

By Max Boot

Columnist

Yesterday at 2:12 p.m. EDT

Workers on April 3 load a van with body bags of Ukrainians killed during the Russian occupation of Bucha, near Kyiv, after it was retaken by Ukrainian forces. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin got one thing right: His invasion did lead to Ukrainian civilians greeting troops as liberators. Only they weren’t greeting Russian troops. They were greeting the Ukrainian troops who in recent days have entered villages around Kyiv that had been occupied by the Russians for more than a month.

The Ukrainian government proclaimed on Saturday that all of the Kyiv administrative region had been freed of Russian control. It was as if the Free French forces were entering Paris in 1944.

The reason civilians were so jubilant to be liberated has become grimly apparent. Sickening pictures from Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, show the corpses of residents who had been bound, shot and left by the side of the road. The mayor of Bucha said that some 270 people had been found in two mass graves and another 40 were lying dead in the streets.

The atrocities in Bucha were no aberration. There is ample evidence of other war crimes by Russian troops across Ukraine. Human Rights Watch has documented Russian troops committing rape, summary execution and looting.

In Mariupol, the Russians bombarded a theater where civilians were sheltering. The word “CHILDREN” was printed in Russian in huge white letters outside. An effort to discourage aerial attack may have actually invited it. Some 300 people in the building were reported killed by Russian bombs on March 16.

But it is one thing to kill civilians with bombs and missiles. It is another to kill them with bullets to the back of the head. This is a different level of evil — the kind of organized atrocity that Europe has not seen since the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995. Russia’s “anti-Nazi” operation has led Russian troops to act precisely as the Nazis once did. If there is any justice in the world, Russian war criminals, from Putin on down, will someday face the kind of justice that the Nazis received at Nuremberg.

This, sadly, is the Russian way of war. It is how Putin’s forces fought in Chechnya and Syria — and before that, how Soviet forces fought in Afghanistan and in central Europe during World War II. They commit war crimes to terrorize the population into surrender. But it hasn’t worked in Ukraine. Russia’s savagery has simply caused the Ukrainians to resist all the harder because they know they are fighting not just for their freedom but for their very survival.

In the past week, the invaders have been driven out of the Kyiv area, with crippling losses. The Russians have lost, according to open-source reporting, at least 400 tanks and, according to the State Department, at least 10,000 troops; by a standard military metric, that means another 30,000 Russian soldiers may have been wounded. So roughly a fourth of the initial Russian assault force — which included Putin’s best troops — is probably out of action.

Some still suggest, incredibly, that the Russian attack on Kyiv was a feint or a brilliant maneuver by Putin to distract his enemies. History will, in fact, record it as a catastrophic military blunder.

Having failed in their initial objective of regime change, the Russians are trying to reorganize their battered and depleted forces to capture the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. This would have been much easier to do at the outset of the war, without those heavy losses. Now the Russians will be hard-put to encircle the Ukrainian forces in the east, which have been fighting Russian-backed separatists since 2014.

How will this war end? No one can yet say. The Ukrainians are rightly enraged by Russian atrocities and will be less likely to make territorial compromises with the invaders, knowing that to do so would be to consign their fellow citizens to a Stalinist hell. But as a former Putin adviser says, “Russia cannot afford to ‘lose,’ so we need a kind of a victory.”

The 1995 Dayton Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia, should remind us that it is possible to make peace even with war criminals — but only after they have been defeated. There is no indication yet that Putin feels he has lost this war. That is why it is so essential that Russia suffer a decisive defeat in the Donbas.

The West must continue to ramp up aid to Ukraine, providing it with the kind of heavy combat systems needed to drive back the Russians in the south and east as they have already done in the north. It is good to see the Biden administration getting ready to transfer tanks to Ukraine.

Other weapons, including artillery, fighter aircraft and long-range air defense systems, must follow. The only way to achieve peace at this point is not by negotiating with the Russians but by defeating them.

As for the Europeans: It is time, finally, to stop all oil and gas purchases from Russia. Germany, in particular, cannot continue paying blood money that subsidizes today’s version of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads. Enough is enough.

War in Ukraine: What you need to know

The latest: Russian troops appeared to be regrouping and shifting their focus away from Kyiv. That could set the stage for a new phase in the conflict — centered on the country’s east — that military analysts warn could be long and bloody. Also, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Ukrainians to prepare for “difficult fights” ahead in the besieged port city of Mariupol. And on the southern coast, explosions were heard throughout Odessa on Sunday morning.

The fight: Nearly five weeks into their invasion, Russian forces continue to mount sporadic attacks on civilian targets in a number of Ukrainian cities. Russia has been accused of committing war crimes.

The weapons: Ukraine is making use of weapons such as Javelin antitank missiles and Switchblade “kamikaze” drones, provided by the United States and other allies. Russia has used an array of weapons against Ukraine, some of which have drawn the attention and concern of analysts.

In Russia: Putin has locked down the flow of information within Russia, where the war isn’t even being called a war. The last independent newsletter in Russia suspended its operations Monday.

Photos: Post photographers have been on the ground from the very beginning of the war — here’s some of their most powerful work.

How you can help: Here are ways those in the U.S. can help support the Ukrainian people as well as what people around the world have been donating.

Read our full coverage of the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for updates and exclusive video.

Opinion by Max Boot

Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.”  Twitter