On atrocities and survivors – Christian Esch and Thore Schröder in Der Spiegel:

‘Irina Gavrilyuk, 42, has returned home. But what does it mean to return when there can be no going back to the way things were? Irina’s house on Ivan Franko Street is still standing, to be sure. But everything in and around it is dead. The bodies of three men, all shot dead, are lying in her yard. One of them is Sergei, Irina’s husband. Another is Roman, Irina’s brother. She doesn’t know who the third man is. Irina’s dogs are also dead. One of them was shot and is lying in the wheelbarrow, the other is in the destroyed doghouse. "They destroyed all life," says Irina. "How can I move back here?"
It is the first day that Irina is seeing the wreckage of her old life. Bucha, a quiet, leafy town near Kyiv was liberated at the end of March. The Russian troops who occupied the place for a month have withdrawn. But with the town’s liberation, the full extent of their crimes have been laid bare: for Irina, who had fled to western Ukraine; for her neighbors, who were unable to leave their homes – and for Europe and the world.
Since Vladimir Putin sent his troops across the border into Ukraine on Feb. 24 – for a "special military operation," as he described it – there have been several indications that war crimes have been committed. Russian troops have demolished the port city of Mariupol and fired indiscriminately at residential districts in Kharkiv. They have abducted civilians, raped women, looted shops and homes – and they have killed.’

(…)

‘Ivan Franko Street, where Irina Gavrilyuk’s house is located, could be a wonderful place in the springtime. A lake and a forest are both a short walk away, the fruit trees are in bloom and little can be seen of the new buildings going up in the city. Bucha is a bedroom community, with Kyiv just a 30-minute commute by train to the southeast. Irina’s husband also worked in the capital, as a security guard in the city center.
The last time Irina saw him was on March 5. The war had been underway for just over a week by then. "When the warplanes flew overhead, the whole house shook," she says. She left the city that day, but Sergei stayed behind. He didn’t want to abandon the animals they had taken in: two dogs and six cats. Irina fled across the Irpin River and onward to western Ukraine. Ten days later, she received a final call from her brother: "Don’t worry," he told her.
She doesn’t know why Sergei and Roman were killed. Neighbors told her that the third man in her yard had been shot by the Russians because he had ventured out onto the street while searching for better mobile phone reception. The occupiers were wary of men speaking on the phone, fearful that they could be passing along coordinates for an artillery attack. Any man under the age of 60 was in danger of being shot, says Irina. Inside the house, the presence of her husband’s murderers is still felt like a shadow: The Russians lived in her bedroom as the dead bodies decomposed outside.
Residents who didn’t flee the invading Russians are standing on the street outside Irina’s home and listing off all those who were killed or who disappeared without a trace. They come up with over a dozen names just within a 200-meter radius. They have just discovered the brothers Vitya and Yuri, with their bodies lying in the drainage ditch beneath the railroad embankment. A young man was found in the basement of the neighboring house, killed by a bullet to the head. And further to the north, on Rydzanych Street, the body of an older man has been lying since early March. He, too, was shot in the head. At the very beginning of Franko Street, there is a pile of six charred bodies. Dogs have gnawed at the remains and pulled a leg off to the side.
Almost every resident of the town has a story to tell of barbarity or threats from the Russian troops. "Do you want to die quickly or slowly," a soldier demanded of Tatyana, a saleswoman with dyed-red hair. She was sitting with Grisha in the cellar and the Russians were furious because their armored personnel carrier at the end of the street had been hit by the Ukrainians. They suspected that a resident had betrayed their position. "If you want to die quickly," the soldier said, "then I will pull this pin out of the hand grenade and throw it into the cellar and in 15 seconds, you will no longer exist. Dying slowly means a shot in the knee." Tatyana responded: "I want to live. I know nothing."’

(…)

‘On March 3, the Ukrainian army released a video showing soldiers flying the Ukrainian flag from the Bucha townhall. The message was clear: Bucha is back in our hands. In truth, though, the Russians were just beginning their second assault. And they had learned from their defeat on Feb. 27. They now knew that they weren’t just fighting the Ukrainian army, but that the population surrounding Kyiv was also against them. This time, they were better prepared. They pushed forward with a larger number of troops, advancing simultaneously from the north and the west. And they proceeded systematically.
Streets were scoured, homes searched. The "зачистка," the sweep operation, wasn’t just handled by regular troops, but also by men wearing black uniforms, likely police units. The front line now ran along the southern edge of the city, with the Ukrainians still holding on in Irpin, the neighboring town to the south.
Ruslan’s apartment complex was also searched, with soldiers breaking down the doors of empty apartments. They were looking for men who had served in the Ukrainian military. Once the search was over, one of the Russian soldiers returned and forced his way back into Ruslan’s apartment. "You son of a bitch, where are the weapons?" he demanded. Ruslan was forced to undress and they examined his tattoos. He had to kneel down with his face to the wall, the barrel of a gun held to his temple. Two shots were fired, right by his head. A fake execution. "I thought to myself: I heard the shots, so I must still be alive. It’s a good thing my family didn’t have to see that."’

(…)

‘Anatoliy Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, says that 290 residents of the town were shot during the Russian occupation – not by salvos of artillery or rocket strikes, but by bullets. Fedoruk speaks quietly and clearly. He has been in office for two decades, and some locals feel that he left them in the lurch since he was neither seen nor heard from during the occupation.’

(…)

‘On March 9, around 4,000 residents were gathered at the meeting point on Energetykiv Street. But their waiting was in vain: Because of Russian shelling, the first buses were only able to leave Bucha the next day. The evacuation then continued uninterrupted for 11 days, with around 20,000 residents leaving the city. When the Russian troops pulled out of Bucha in late March, only 4,000 to 5,000 people remained in the city, Shapravskiy estimates. Bucha is almost empty.’

(…)

‘For others, their telephones became a death sentence. Internet and mobile coverage were cut off at the beginning of the occupation, along with electricity and gas, but there was still enough reception on the top floors of buildings to send text messages. That allowed city officials to collect information about Russian positions and send them on to the Ukrainian military, says Shapravskiy. "Every mobile phone was a potentially deadly weapon for the Russians," he says. When people were searched, the first thing the Russians looked for were mobile phones.’

(…)

‘Because the troops frequently rotated, it is difficult to say which units committed what crimes. It is also unclear which atrocities were committed randomly and which were the product of direct orders. It is clear, however, that some Russian units were not very disciplined. The looting and the quantities of liquor and whiskey bottles left behind by the soldiers are evidence of this.
Russia has rejected all responsibility for the death of Bucha citizens. "The whole situation in Bucha is a well-staged insinuation, nothing else," Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed this week.
The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, however, intercepted Russian military radio traffic from the region north of Kyiv in which the murder of civilians was apparently discussed. In one of the intercepted exchanges, a man can apparently be heard saying that soldiers should first be interrogated and then shot. The exchanges seem to indicate that the atrocities were no accident. The BND says that the soldiers talked about the murders as though they were part of their day-to-day lives.
Yevgeniya and her daughter Varya – whose names have been changed for this story – are among the few locals who interacted with the Russian soldiers almost throughout the occupation, as their neighbors on Ivana Franka Street were hiding in their cellars. "We were constantly trying to calm them down. Sometimes, they wanted to light the entire neighborhood on fire. Sometimes, they wanted to throw a grenade into a house. Sometimes, they said: Come on, I’m going to kill you," says Varya. "They were totally crazed, young guys, a lot of them with Asian features. Some kind of Buryatians."
One tall soldier who went by the alias "Giraffe" took a particular interest in Varya. "It’s better if she does it with me than with the others," he said. In tears, a horrified Yevgeniya showed the soldier her daughter’s birth certificate. "She’s not even 14! Look at how her room is decorated!" She also pulled out the epaulettes of her late father, who was a Russian and served as an officer in Vladivostok, and showed them to the soldier.
"He said: 'If not her, then you,'" Yevgeniya says. "My old mother had to watch. I told her: Mom, please don’t scream, don’t cry and don’t cuss them out." While Yevgeniya was being raped, the others sat around giggling. "Aunt Sveta told me: 'Be careful, they are completely deranged. Be brave.'"’

(…)

‘The International Criminal Court in The Hague has, at least, already sent investigators to Ukraine. And the former court judge Wolfgang Schomburg believes that initial charges could be filed against Russian troops as early as this year. He also thinks that an arrest warrant for Putin himself is possible in the mid-term.
Hopes for some form of justice is one of the few things left for many people in Bucha.’

Read the article here.

The description of the rape, the mother pleading to leave her daughter untouched, sounds like a repetition of the Red Army entering Germany in ‘45.
Soldiers of other armies raped as well, but not on the same scale as the Red Army.

It’s hard to find a war where civilians have not been killed and mass rape has not been committed. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been horrible and violent enough, but compared to other wars it seems that Western troops over there have not been engaged in mass rape, probably also for practical reasons (fear, repercussions, lack of women – they hid well - et cetera), and execution of civilians was as far as I know rare. Many civilians died, mainly by mistake, bombs dropped on wrong places. Whether this is better remains the question. It feels cleaner, less of a brutal, dark carnival that extreme violence almost always is, From the concentration camps run by Nazi Germany to Rwanda.

Then there is the booze.
Drugs and booze and war go hand in hand. Think of the magnificent scene in ‘Platoon’ where marijuana provides a temporary heaven in Vietnam for American soldiers.

Not too lang ago a book was published about the use of Pervitin among German soldiers in the Third Reich, I’m not convinced that drug use is really helpful to explain to atrocities committed by what we safely can call mor or less ordinary man and women, but it was there also.

Also, I’m not convinced that the Russians soldiers were barbarians. They were ordinary young men as well. Given the death rate of Russian soldiers they must have known that their own death might be near.
The proximity of your own death in war zone often leads to war crimes, especially where there no officers (or politicians) who are willing to stop the atrocities. There is always a choice, also for the Russian soldiers, they just had back luck they were fighting an enemy whose women could be raped with the impunity and indifference that we know from other wars, unlike their comrades in ’45 and its surroundings let’s say. Needless to say, this had also to with the incredible war crimes that Nazi Germany committed with the help of a considerable part of the population, but still.

A last note, all serious armies around the world are studying – as we speak – the war in Ukraine. The lessons that can be learned from this war will be used in the next.
One question for example is whether a tank is helpful when the enemy has drones with weapons that can destroy a tank.