Thursday, April 20, 2023

Russian Savagery

No European nation since the Germans in WWII has perpetrated so many horrific atrocities on another European nation has have Vladimir Putin's Russians against the Ukrainians. Michael Weiss at Yahoo News elaborates. Here are a few excerpts:
Details of brutal war crimes committed by the Wagner Group in Ukraine have been published by Gulagu.net, a Russian human rights organization. In the horrifying testimonies, Azamat Uldarov and Alexei Savichev, who say they served as Wagner unit commanders, confess in explicit detail the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians, injured Ukrainian prisoners of war and Russian servicemen who had deserted or refused to take part in the massacre.

Wagner has played a key role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by filling out the Kremlin’s front lines with waves of its mercenary fighters. Moscow has allowed Wagner to recruit convicts like Uldarov and Savichev directly from Russian prisons, offering amnesty even for the most violent offenders in exchange for throwing them into the maw of war.

In January, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Wagner as a transnational criminal organization, accusing it of having “engaged in an ongoing pattern of serious criminal activity, including mass executions, rape, child abductions, and physical abuse in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali.” The killings described by Uldarov and Savichev allegedly took place during the recent Russian offensives in Bakhmut and Soledar.

The mercenaries gave Gulagu.net explicit details about how Russian forces were ordered to go house by house in Bakhmut, killing anyone they found inside, civilian and military alike. “To kill everyone. Not to take anyone prisoner." Uldarov claimed, adding that his forces carried out these orders ruthlessly.

“When I went into the basement, there were children there. And I was instructed not to release any. I was in command. Me and my group killed everyone. Then we all left. We didn’t let anyone out,” he said. “There were about 40 children there. I gave the command to kill everyone. It was a big house, nine floors. The whole basement was packed and mined. I made the decision to ‘zero’ everyone.”

In another chilling video, Uldarov describes how he personally murdered a young Ukrainian girl. “She is screaming. She’s little, you know? Five, maybe 6 years old. And I took a kill shot, you know?”

In separate video testimony, Savichev detailed to Osechkin the murder of unarmed young Ukrainian teenagers earlier this year. Savichev recounted how teenagers captured by Russian forces were made to pull up their shirts to reveal any possible tattoos — a common Russian tactic to determine their ideological disposition.

Wagner mercenaries shot those with tattoos, Savichev said. He attempted to justify his actions by claiming he didn’t consider the teenage Ukrainians to be “civilians.” The presence of tattoos, he asserted, was evidence that his victims were members of the Azov battalion, a nationalist unit in the Ukrainian military.

Supporting evidence of the ex-mercenaries’ atrocities was further published by Ukraine’s domestic security service, the SBU. On its Telegram channel, the organization published what it claims was an intercepted phone call between a Russian soldier and a woman who is apparently his wife, supporting the testimonies made by Gulagu.net.

In the recording, the unnamed Russian soldier details a similar “no quarter” policy, explaining how he, too, had to kill women, children and teenage girls. The woman attempts to justify the murder of civilians, claiming that “anyone peaceful will have already left.”

Last week, a video circulated on social media showing a captive Ukrainian soldier being beheaded by his Russian captors. Another video showed two beheaded Ukrainian soldiers near a destroyed Ukrainian M113 armored personnel carrier.

Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament’s human rights commissioner, told the news outlet Ukrainska Pravda that his office has received “dozens” of videos showing Russians publicly executing Ukrainians. "There are beheadings, cutting off genitals, ears, nose, limbs or phalanges on the hands,” Lubinets said. “Some [of the perpetrators] have been identified.”
When there's no moral compass in a man's life he finds that there's really nothing preventing him from behaving like a beast, which is, after all, what a secular society claims we actually are. Ever since Darwin children around the globe have been taught that we're just a bundle of appetites, that there's no soul, no objective right and wrong, no transcendent moral judge who will hold us ultimately accountable.

So far from being created in the image of God, children have been taught that we're created in the image of apes. It's no wonder that men in war behave so savagely. We reap what we sow.