As Russian artillery and rockets rain down on Ukrainian hospitals and apartment blocks, devastating residential districts of no military value, the world watches in horror at what, for Russia, is an increasingly habitual.
His forces carried out similar attacks in Syria, bombing hospitals and other civilian structures as part of Russia’s intervention to prop up the Russian government.
Moscow went even further in Chechnyaa border region that had sought independence at the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
A desolate Grozny, Chechnya, in February 2000. Photo Dmitry Belyakov/Associated Press
During two formative wars there, Russia’s artillery and air force turned city blocks into debrisand his ground troops massacred civilians in what was widely seen as a deliberate campaign to terrorize the population into submission.
Now, Vladimir Putinwhose rise to the presidency of Russia was paralleled and somewhat cemented by the Chechen wars, appears to be deploying a similar playbook in Ukrainealthough so far only by increments.
These tactics reflect something more specific than simple cruelty.
They grew out of Russia’s experiences in a series of wars that led its leaders to conclude, for both strategic and ideological reasons, that bombing entire populations was not only acceptable but militarily sensible.
They also reflect the circumstances of an authoritarian state with few allies, allowing the Kremlin to ignore and even disgust its military conduct, or so Russian leaders seem to believe.
“Massive devastation and collateral deaths among the civilian population are acceptable to limit one’s own casualties,” Alexei Arbatov, a leading Russian military strategist and federal legislator at the time, wrote in 2000 during Russia’s second war in Chechnya.
“The use of force is the most efficient problem solver, if applied decisively and massively,” Arbatov wrote, adding that international horror at Russian actions must be “discounted.”
But the staggering human cost that proponents of this approach dismiss as Irrelevant may be part of why it has failed so far in Ukraine.
Global outrage did not reverse Russian advances in Chechnya or Syria.
But now he is pushing sanctions and military support that are devastating Russia’s economy and plunging his invasion into a quagmire, underscoring that Moscow’s way of war may not be as ruthlessly pragmatic as he thinks.
United StatesIt, of course, also frequently kills civilians in war, in drone strikes and other airstrikes whose toll it sees as a regrettable but acceptable cost.
Although the intent behind this strategy differs from Russia’s, the distinction may be of little consequence to the dead.
A form of Russian war
The Soviet armed forces emerged from World War II with a mission never again to allow a foreign invasion of the homeland, growing formidable enough to go toe-to-toe with the combined forces of NATO.
But in 1979, he faced a threat for which he was ill-prepared: an insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan, where Soviet forces intervened that year.
The Soviets suffered heavy casualties at the hands of Afghan rebels before limping home in humiliating defeat a decade later.
During the course of the war, Soviet officers came to favor air power as well as large-scale displays of violence.
“In the valleys around Kabul, the Russians undertook a series of major operations against hundreds of tanks, mobilizing significant means, using bombs, rockets, napalm and even, once, gas, destroying everything in their path”, a 1984 Time.news of the war told.
Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it much of what had been the Soviet military.
That year, Chechnya’s leaders began to assert the region’s independence. In 1994, Moscow ordered a major assault to regain control.
Russian troops again faced heavy losses against the insurgents.
A months-long siege Groznythe capital of Chechnya, destroyed much of the city and killed thousands of civilians.
Still, Russian troops withdrew in a 1996 defeat that further loosened the Kremlin’s weakening power.
But when Moscow launched a second invasion in 1999, its top general said that if Russia had been wrong, it was because it “sinned by being too kind,” promising even greater violence.
Human rights groups recorded waves of massacres during the war.
In some cases, Russian officials declared certain villages to be “safe zones,” then blanketed them with so-called fuel-air bombs banned by the Geneva Conventions, killing dozens at a time.
“All those who remain in Grozny will be considered terrorists and will be annihilated by artillery and aviation,” warned an official military edict.
Although the declaration was rescinded, Russian forces shelled the city indiscriminately, blocking its exits to prevent residents from fleeing.
Putin, whom the president Boris Yeltsin promoted from virtual anonymity to prime minister around the start of the war, he asserted himself as the face of the conflict, visiting the front lines and pushing for it to escalate.
When Yeltsin resigned, Putin became Acting Presidenta post he formally won in a war-dominated election.
built his presidency around the conflict asserting presidential powers and curtailing political rights as wartime necessities, defending it ever since as a great triumph.
That conflict, along with the Russian military’s adaptations to a new Europe in which NATO forces now vastly outnumbered its own, led to a new kind of doctrine.
“The assault of troops, which previously determined the outcome of battles, will be used today, and even more so in the future, only to complete the defeat of the enemy,” AA Korabelnikov, a Russian officer, wrote in a 2019 white paper. .
Instead, artillery and air power would do much of the work, dealing devastating damage from afar.
But because much of this technology was still Soviet-era, the strikes were often indiscriminate, something Moscow had adopted in Chechnya anyway.
When Russian forces entered the war in Syria in 2015, the country’s Moscow-allied army was already massacring civilians on a large scale.
Seeking to avoid an Afghanistan-style quagmire, Russian air power pulverized Syrian cities from above, cementing the Chechnya model.
Valery Gerasimov, now Russia’s top general, wrote in 2016 that the country’s forces were “gaining invaluable combat experience in Syria,” learning lessons that Moscow extrapolated into formal policy next year.
Russian forces did not immediately repeat this approach in Ukraine.
But as the invasion has tapered off, they have increasingly targeted civilian areas, especially cities like Mariupol and Kharkiv that they have struggled to capture.
hearing costs
Strong leaders like Putin, because they face less responsibility from citizens and fewer checks on their power than even other types of dictators, tend to be more aggressive and take more risks in war, research has found.
This also makes them better able to ignore public disgust at civilian casualties, which polls show can lead citizens in democracies to withdraw support for foreign wars.
Russia also has few real allies, usually a restriction on military conduct towards foreign civilians.
Putin has even repeated a famous saying by Alexander III, a 19th-century Russian emperor, that the only true allies of Russia were its army and navy.
This does not mean that widely allied democracies like the United States necessarily kill fewer civilians in war.
US air campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have killed large numbers of civilians.
Under an Obama administration policy, the US launched drone strikes against groups of people simply because they fit certain profiles, sometimes mistakenly targeting weddings or funerals.
The United States has at times used indiscriminate tools of war, for example dropping 1,200 cluster bombs, which much of the world has banned because of their danger to civilians, in its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.
US strikes in the Syrian city of Raqqa, then in the hands of the Islamic State group, killed dozens, with a single errant bomb killing 70 civilians.
US officials stress that they are striving to avoid civilian casualties, which they know infuriates local populations who hope to win.
Still, the US has long maintained a strategy, focused on air power and drone strikes, that it knows carries a significant probability of killing civilians, even by covering up embarrassing incidents.
Questions about how to analyze the relative morality of these two approaches (deliberately killing civilians versus choosing a strategy that is known to cause it) may ultimately matter more to the perpetrators of these strategies than to their victims.
According to high-level estimates from Airwars, a nonprofit group, the russian air campaign in Syria killed 6,398 civilians, while that of the US-led coalition in Iraq killed 13,244.
A horrible kind of war
For all of Moscow’s embrace of brutality in warfare, much of the cost of Russia’s wars can be reduced to a simple matter of location of fighting:
often in big cities controlled by the opposition.
Throughout the modern era, urban sieges have always been among the bloodiest forms of warfare.
They are often defined by terrifying violence against civilians, as invaders seek to eradicate bastions of resistance from areas where perhaps millions of innocents still live.
Mass homelessness and hunger are common.
As armed resistance advances, the occupiers will often come to see entire populations as threats to be suppressed.
In World War II, both the United States and the Soviet Union laid waste to German cities.
US-led firebombing of German and Japanese cities killed hundreds of thousands.
It’s a lesson hardly foreign to the Russians, who endured, in that war, some of the deadliest sieges in modern history.
“Where is humanity headed?” a survivor wrote in his diary in the midst of the two-year siege of Leningrad by Nazi forces in which 800,000 civilians were killed.
“How will this most brutal carnage end? Scary questions!
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