War Crimes Were Always Part of Russia's Plan

With reports that as many as 20,000 civilians may have died in the southern port city of Mariupold and the forced movemnet of over 30,000 Ukrainians to Russia, and findings that of rape and sexual violence have been increasing the images coming out of Ukraine are chilling.  Indeed, there is now little doubt that Russia is deliberately committing war crimes as a form of terror against civilian populations.  To make matters now even worse, Putin has appoited a new commanding general to oversee the Russian assualt in the east of Ukraine who has the nickname "the butcher of Syria" for the horrors he visited on civilians where tens of thousands died.  To date, these criminal actions have not cowed Ukrainian forces and seem to have galvannized much of the world - certainly western nations - to step up support for Ukraine.  A piece in Politico looks at this deliberate murder of civilians.  One can only hope that someday Putin is brought to justice and tried, convicted and preferably in my view, executed for his crimes. Here are highlights:

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday that the war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine were part of President Vladimir Putin’s master plan for the invasion.

“We, in fact, before the war began declassified intelligence and presented it,” Sullivan said on ABC’s “This Week,” “indicating that there was a plan from the highest levels of the Russian government to target civilians who oppose the invasion, to cause violence against them, to organize efforts to brutalize them in order to try to terrorize the population and subjugate it. So this is something that was planned.”

Russia’s recent retreat from areas near Kyiv left behind massive evidence of atrocities, particularly in Bucha, where civilians who had been executed, many with their hands tied behind their backs, were found through the area.

On top of that, Russia has targeted civilian sites throughout the war, with airstrikes on hospitals and places where refugees have congregated.

“The images that we’ve seen out of Bucha and other cities have been tragic, they’ve been horrifying,” Sullivan told host Jonathan Karl. “They’ve been downright shocking, but they have not been surprising.”

Sullivan did say that it was possible that some acts of brutality were spontaneous, suggesting that Russian soldiers who were frustrated by how poorly the invasion was going turned on Ukraine’s civilians.

“They had been told they were going to have a glorious victory,” Sullivan said of the Russian troops, “and just ride into Kyiv without any opposition with Ukrainians welcoming them and when that didn’t happen, I do think some of these units engaged in these acts of brutality, these atrocities, these war crimes even without direction from above.”

“But make no mistake, the larger issue of broad-scale war crimes and atrocities in Ukraine lies at the feet of the Kremlin and lies at the feet of the Russian president,” he added.