The destruction of human life on the streets of Bucha and Borodyanka, and in the basement shelters of Mariupol, is both monstrous and banal. The dynamics of such an evil, wanton aggression of humans on humans, are deep and difficult to fathom.
Some atrocities seem to have been committed by soldiers running amok, a symptom of a complete human breakdown. How much of this was organised, part of a deliberate policy and command? Who should be held accountable, and can they be held accountable at all? Craziness in the ranks of a chaotic army in the field is complemented by a collective psychotic craziness among the leadership in Moscow.
The scenes of criminality, the shooting and bombing of innocents, are as old as the story of war itself, says the eminent psychiatrist Dr Anthony Fry. “Once psyched up, stressed and after days of sleeplessness, the killing becomes relentless, behaviour brutalised. There is no shortage of examples of this from Genghis Khan to Pol Pot.”
The Russian military tradition is particularly brutal. Advancing on Berlin in 1945, Marshal Zhukov cleared minefields by driving his punishment battalions across them like cattle. Robert Kee, the historian and journalist, told me that his commander told him to run away from the Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp as the Russians approached in 1945.
“We hid up in the woods. The advancing Russians were the wildest, and most terrifying humans I have ever seen — they were crazed, wild-eyed, out of their minds.” Most soldiers “are high on adrenaline, drugs or alcohol”, says Dr Fry. “They numb all injury — which generates a horrible fighting dynamic.”
Rape and torture are among the most common atrocities of undisciplined fighters. Often, says Dr Fry, they become a revenge mechanism. “When your buddy has been blown up next to you, with his body parts all over the place, there is a tendency to seek vengeance and kill anybody and anything.”
A vital factor is sleeplessness — a key element in methods of torture, says Dr Fry. “After three days you sort of go mad. You are bombed out and stressed, and the brain doesn’t work any more.”
Grief and the thirst for revenge lead to a unit spiralling down to collapse. “If your buddies have gone, and you just focus on grief — things really start to fail.” A marked feature of Russia’s war is the dehumanising of the imagined enemy. You don’t offer the normal elements of civility — like not providing buckets for toilets on the trains taking Jews to the extermination camps in Nazi Germany. “That way they soil themselves. The victims arrive dirty and dishevelled and so are treated as sub-humans. I think much the same is going on in places like Mariupol.”
This coincides with an extraordinary wave of annihilation propaganda. Not only does Ukraine not exist as a separate country and people, according to the new Putinland rubric, there now must be mass “denazification”. The former Russian president, and fully paid-up Putin acolyte, Dmitry Medvedev declared earlier this week that the “special military operation to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine will not only be decided on the battlefields”. Already refugees and prisoners of war are being pushed towards “filtration camps” along Russia’s border.
An editorial for the RIA Novosti news agency declares, “Total purification should be carried out.” This sounds like a warrant for genocide.
It is all a battle for the defence of Holy Russia as a great “nation-civilisation” declaims Putin ally Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox church. Russia is now to be the leader of a great Eurasian civilisation stretching from Vladivostok to Lisbon in Portugal.
The vision is strikingly similar to imagery of the notions of purification and grace in the Nazi Reich of a thousand years, or the millennium of perfect socialism of extreme Marxism-Leninism. This tradition of millenarian prophecy has an extremely bloody history back through the various European wars of religion to the prophecies of Joachim of Floris, and the Book of Revelation.
We should not demonise the whole people and civilisation of Russia. The roots and dynamics of evil in Ukraine are tangled and complex. But someone has to answer for it. Asked if he thought the murder of the Nazi consul in Paris in 1938 was a futile gesture, the Italian resistance luminary Gaetano Salvemini was blunt. “No, when you are faced with evil, you have to do something.”
