Vladimir Putin is reverting to full brutalist form after his military got off to a slow start in its effort to conquer Ukraine.
Russian missiles and rockets slammed into Kharkiv’s central Freedom Square on Tuesday, blowing up a civilian government headquarters and damaging the opera house and concert hall. Russian missiles also hit the TV tower in Kyiv — and far greater horrors against civilian targets are no doubt coming soon.
As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on video after the Kharkiv blast, Russia’s current attacks are “outright, undisguised terror” against civilians.
But why should any Western leader be surprised? Putin has been getting away with war crimes for the past two decades, as his Russian forces slaughtered and gassed civilians in Chechnya, Syria and elsewhere. No one stopped him.
A look at the Russian leader’s past crimes provides a road map of what he wants to do to Kyiv, and what he’ll try to do elsewhere if he’s allowed to crush Ukraine.
Let’s start with the First Chechen War in 1995, which happened five years before Putin became president, but gives some insight into the no-holds-barred Russian doctrine of military attack.
In 1995, I flew from Moscow into Chechnya on a Russian military transport plane and arrived at a Russian base in Tolstoy-Yurt, on a hill looking down on the edges of the Chechen capital of Grozny. There I watched for hours as Russian heavy artillery pounded nonstop into eight-story civilian apartment buildings directly below. These were buildings where ethnic Russian retirees, seeking a warmer climate, had made their homes, but that did not deter the Russian fire.
The city of Grozny was essentially destroyed.
Many military experts believe Putin may resort to that harsh military doctrine now because his forces have met unexpected resistance from the Ukrainian military and civilians. It also appears that the Russian military initially refrained from heavy use of air power or missile attacks on inner cities because they mistakenly expected to be welcomed by Ukrainians as brother Slavs and to wage a quick war.
“The initial Russian operation was premised on terrible assumptions about Ukraine’s ability [and] will to fight, and an unworkable concept of operations,” tweets Michael Kofman, a top expert on the Russian military at CNA, who correctly predicted that Putin would invade the entire country of Ukraine.
“But we’re seeing them open up greater use of fires, [missile] strikes, and air power,” Kofman noted. “Sadly, I expect the worst is yet ahead, and this war could get a lot more ugly.”
To see what “ugly” means, one need only look at what Russian airstrikes did to Syrian civilians, in Putin’s successful effort to keep Syrian leader Bashar Assad in power.
Russian pilots bombed civilian areas from 2015 on, in suburbs of Damascus, the ancient city of Aleppo and other Syrian cities, over and over. They deliberately targeted hospitals, schools and marketplaces. And in a pattern of unfathomable cruelty, they practiced what became known as the “double-tap” — waiting until civilian volunteers arrived to pull victims out of the rubble, and then bombing the same sites again.
“We haven’t seen scenes like Syria [yet], like the carpet-bombing and brutal attacks against civilians, like Aleppo,” said strategic expert Israeli Col. (res.) Udi Evental, in a riveting podcast on the site of the newspaper Haaretz.
Evental warns, however: “Syria was Putin’s laboratory, and a laboratory for his military to test their capabilities. These might be very soon demonstrated in Ukraine.”
Moreover, Putin consciously weaponized refugees in the Syria conflict, and no doubt envisions doing the same with Ukraine. By bombing infrastructure and civilian housing, he forced hundreds of thousands of Syrians to flee to Europe, causing a huge political crisis in the European Union in 2015 and 2016. So far, EU countries are welcoming more than 600,000 Ukrainians who have fled, but that number could rise to millions.
It is essential for President Joe Biden and European leaders to recognize that Putin is a cold-blooded killer who will not refrain from committing — and denying he committed — war crimes, even as video footage tells the truth.
It is also essential to recognize that the Russian leader was serious when he said in 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.” He truly believes that Ukraine has no right to exist as a country and that all of Eastern Europe must return to Russian control.
Fortunately, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has finally woken Western Europe up to the Putin threat and has impelled President Biden to impose the harsh sanctions he promised. But Zelenskyy is still a Ukrainian David facing a Russian Goliath, and Putin has already sent in Chechen hit teams to kill him.
NATO must do what it takes to thwart the criminal in the Kremlin. There have to be means short of sending NATO troops — whether by shoring up Ukraine’s cyber defenses, by finding ways to quickly deliver those promised anti-air and anti-tank weapons or by covert means.
Cheering for Zelenskyy in the comfort of Western capitals won’t save him. Putin must be stopped from turning Kyiv into Aleppo in order to achieve his criminal dreams.
