Ukraine

Do most rapists use condoms? That seems like strange supporting evidence.

 

It is not a tool they use it is a war crime.

DD

 

Armies are traditionally very "practical" (i.e. indifferent to accomidating) when it comes to the sexual needs of their soldiers, but simultaneously very concerned with minimizing sexually transmitted diseases (passed from soldier to soldier) that could make troops combat ineffective.

Just a reminder:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings

And those were elite volunteer troops from one of the most well disciplined armies ever, operating with a serious top down focus on winning hearts and minds. None of these are true of the Russian conscripts and their broke-ass sullen army.

I find this more to be an incitement of war in general than anything specific to Russia, or indicative of a "policy of rape".

Now, I'm pretty sure the Russians will never identify ot hold the soldiers accountable for their crimes, but that is pretty par for the course for history.

Was sucks, and when you start one, you can pretty much guarantee some inhuman s**t that you don't particularly want to happen is going to happen, which is why you don't start wars on whims.

 

War crimes at the individual level happen in every war. War crimes from the leadership level happen too often also.

The bombing of civilian infrastructure. Self-evidence.

The killing of civilians in regions occupied by the Russian army. The info I read so far indicates leadership level. The Russian gov is already making some ridiculous lies (and their home audience will believe it). Ukrainian military killed those civilians when they showed up after the Russians left.

Rape. Not yet clear to me if this is at the leadership level or individual level.

 

Reminder: Tucker Carlson literally rooted for Putin Russia over Ukraine. Very bad person.

 

Spoiler: Russian war crimes

 

Man, as a human being and father, I would be going Jeffrey Dahmer (excluding the rape part) all over those p*****s for doing this ****. Just disgusting people and deserve to be tortured and humiliated.

 

I think we have our answer.

 

/r/selfawarewolves

 

Are you saying Genghis Khan is a war criminal?

 

Of course he was.....

DD

 

In Russian culture he and the Mongols are considered to be not just war criminals but also demons.

 

As I've said there is no such thing as a clean war. It's still up to military leadership to restrain and discipline their troops. Even if these actions weren't due to orders from higher up they still represent a major failure of the military discipline and control.

It's another sign of the low morale of Russian troops.

 

The Russians started this war by claiming that they needed to "de-nazify" Ukraine and that the average citizenry would welcome them as liberators. That creates a binary element. You're either with the supposed liberators (the Russians) or you're with the supposed "Nazis" (who the Russians claim are the Ukrainian government). This effectively dehumanized most of Ukraine since people didn't greet the Russians as liberators and instead were almost entirely opposed to their presence. So in the minds of a lot of Russians (including soldiers), the Ukrainians have sided with the "Nazis" and thus are expendable.

So while part of this might be leadership decisions, part of it also boils down to the fact that the Russians are now being fed logic that equate the average Ukrainian to hardcore Nazis from the 1940s. I don't know if you've followed the evolution of Russian propaganda during the war but it has gotten more absurd and dehumanizing over time.

 

There could be some to that but often in military campaigns when things like this happen it is because of a breakdown in discipline and frustration on the part of troops. There are a lot of stories of soldiers going on rampages just before a defeat or a retreat. Especially soldiers fighting in foreign lands.

The largest single defeat of the British Empire was in Singapore during WWII when 150,000 British troops surrendered to the Japanese. When it was clear that the British were going to lose and likely badly discipline broke down among the British who started looting, raping and abusing in other ways the Chinese and Malay population of Singapore.

 

Russians, as a national ethos, don't believe in any kind of law besides the law of the strong. They don't believe in human rights. They are not advanced enough to have developed that sort of complex morals. Especially considering that a large part of their contracted army comes with experiences from Syria, Africa, Chechnya. They are bound to commit a lot of atrocities. Humans (their own and the opposing force) are cannon fodder to Russian government historically.

The longer this war goes on, the more brutal and horrifying things will get, which is crazy considering where things stand now. I hope Biden has an exit strategy in mind with all of his calls for war crime tribunals, regime changes, and trying of a head of a nuclear superpower in court. Putin is known to make stupid decisions when incensed but does US really want him to use tactical nuclear weapons to achieve his (now) limited goals in Ukraine? I'm sure Biden's snippets in that regard are driving Putin into rage, which means many more deaths. At this point, the only goal can be to ensure that China can't use propaganda to position Russians as the good guys domestically. And to provide excuse to position strategic forces in Baltics. But the means of doing so are just so incredibly heartbreaking, where one finds it impossible to remain cynical.

 

He also doesn't know that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are all in NATO and border Russia. The "buffer state" argument is bogus because it already doesn't exist. If Russia took over Ukraine it would be bordered by even more NATO countries than it already is. Would Russia be justified in being even more "afraid" than it is now?

This is a larger point, but it's incredible how conservatives who fawned over "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" are now all for allowing a brutal dictator to run roughshod over fledgling democracies like Ukraine. Tucker tells them that Ukraine has corruption, isn't "really a democracy" (whatever that means for a country that has internationally-monitored elections and two popular uprisings against Russian control in the last 20 years) and they decide that democracy, as an antidote to totalitarianism, isn't worth supporting. Suddenly they care how the dictator "feels" while he invades a sovereign country (for the second time!) and commits war crimes in broad daylight.

So much about the last few years has revealed them to be nothing more than statists, not "republicans".