Most Americans have no clue about the extent of civilian destruction, rape, murder, and torture the Kremlin has brought to Russian-occupied territories.
NATO dithers while Russia’s indiscriminate killing in Ukraine underlines that Putin only understands force
What I have seen is a mountain of evidence as to why there is no point to negotiations with a Kremlin leader who disdains international law, commits war crimes too numerous to catalog — and has broken every accord Russia made with Ukraine since the Soviet Union dissolved.I visited Kyiv, the key southern port of Odesa, the eastern front lines near Pokrovsk and Chasiv Yar, and the cities of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, where many internal refugees from the occupied territories live.
I have seen this Russian destruction over and over in every big city I have visited — deliberate targeting of universities, high schools, markets, cinemas, shopping malls, even the Ukrainian equivalent of a huge Home Depot in Kharkiv. Most revolting to Ukrainian soldiers is the Russian disregard for their own men, leaving dead bodies to rot in trenches and fields and even burying the wounded alive.
“This is how they advance. When we see the way they treat their own with no respect, as if they are not human, all the hairs on our bodies stand on end.”“Putin said Ukraine needed to concede four regions” — which Russian troops only partly occupy — “to Moscow. But how can we accept that if there are Ukrainian citizens there who don’t want to live under Russia? They know what will happen, like Bucha, Hostomel, or Mariupol — massive killing and rapes,” he said.
“People were screaming because you could see men and women stuck under collapsed concrete plates. The Russians didn’t bother to help. They waited for them to stop screaming. A nice lady wearing a pink robe was crying for help. Some humanitarian volunteers begged the Russian police to rescue her. They said, ‘Shut your mouth.’”
Alex told me how Russians had stripped the facilities of his technical university bare, tossing out all books in Ukrainian and even Russian books whose content they disliked. The Russians also looted the local history museum. An avid techie, Alex managed to hack into the database of his university and found a series of presentations the Russians had designed for lecturers to give to high school and university classes.
They were guaranteed an honorable surrender and humane prison conditions by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which then did little to prevent them from being delivered to pure hell.
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