From: Roman Sheremeta — “For Russians, performative cruelty is a tool of war,” British historian Antony Beevor told The Telegraph.
Russia’s actions in Ukraine are not an anomaly. They are the continuation of several centuries of an especially brutal military culture that the West has long ignored.
The mass rapes, torture, and killings in Bucha were systematic. The more than 19,500 kidnapped Ukrainian children reveal the true meaning of “Russian liberation.”
The Russian soldier is shaped inside a system of violence. In the 1990s, five thousand conscripts took their own lives every year. The generals laughed about it.
Recently one commander ordered new recruits to dig their own graves because “they’ll need them soon.”
This is how the “chain-of-abuse effect” works: those brutalized by the system go on to brutalize others. In 1945, the victims were Polish, Hungarian, and German women. Today — Ukrainian women.
In Berlin, they even raped exhausted concentration camp prisoners.
The Russian logic is simple: “the victor is never judged.” The very concept of legitimacy in war simply does not exist there.
The cruelty in Bucha began when Russia’s blitzkrieg failed. Beevor draws a historical parallel: the Nazis turned to gas chambers in 1942 when they realized they would not defeat the USSR. A frustrated occupier always becomes more brutal.
After the war, hundreds of thousands of broken, traumatized, and criminalized Russian soldiers — including former convicts from “penal battalions” — will return home. Even now, new crimes are being documented, committed by the “heroes of the special military operation” who received amnesty for their service.
Russia’s losses are about 1 million: around 250,000 killed and 750,000 wounded. The Kremlin deployed mobile crematoria to hide the bodies.
Beevor says Putin will break any ceasefire and blame Ukraine and Europe — and Trump will support him. Real peace is highly unlikely.
Just as after World War I, when Britain and France could not believe anyone would start another war — and therefore underestimated Hitler — today the world is stepping on the very same rake again.
Source: translated and adopted from Tymofiy Mylovanov
Voice of Ukraine 