The war in Ukraine has entered its third week, yet still Russia’s once vaunted armed forces are struggling to control much of the country. These blundering heirs to the Red Army are said to be tightening their grip on Kyiv, but the outcome remains deeply uncertain. The aura of invincibility that once enveloped Russia’s military is destroyed. Its reputation lies in ruins amid the rubble of invasion. Frustration over the slow pace of advance has led to a change in tactics. Instead of directly engaging the resistance, the Russians have besieged major cities and taken to long-range shelling and bombing by artillery, missiles and air strikes. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says more Ukrainian civilians than soldiers are being killed as a result.
This cowardly, reckless policy has inevitably led to atrocities, such as last week’s lethal attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol. That vile act and the often repeated, deliberate, indiscriminate targeting of civilian areas and the humanitarian corridors supposedly protected by local ceasefires self-evidently constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Compounding its offence, Russia has resorted to the use in urban areas of mass-casualty weapons such as cluster munitions, which scatter hundreds of small, delayed-action bomblets. The UK’s Ministry of Defence alleges Russia is also firing thermobaric rockets, known as vacuum bombs, which suck oxygen from the air (and people’s lungs) to generate an explosion.
This barbaric approach to fighting, previously seen in Chechnya and Syria’s civil war, and Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression breach international law as codified in 1949 by the Geneva Conventions and the UN charter, and upheld, in theory, by the UN security council and the international court of justice in The Hague.
It is vitally important, as was the case in Syria and before that in Bosnia, that the UN, western governments and human rights groups gather evidence and records of Russian actions in order that political leaders with “command responsibility” and soldiers on the ground may be held to account. Prosecutors at the international criminal court have already begun this process.
Many of the organisational and logistical difficulties facing the invaders are of their own making. Contradicting President Vladimir Putin’s denials, Moscow now admits inexperienced, ill-trained conscripts have been thrown into battle. Thousands have died. This is another crime – committed by Putin against his own people. Yet it is the valiant, unexpectedly effective resistance mounted by Ukraine’s armed forces and civilian volunteers that has caused the biggest problems for Russian troops. They were told by Kremlin propagandists they would be welcomed as liberators. The opposite is happening. Putin’s big lie, that Ukrainians lack freedom, is exploded. Instead, they are fighting to be free of him.
Putin’s frustration and impatience now appear to be taking an even more sinister turn. Western officials warned last week that, judging by its previous actions in Syria and recent intelligence, Russia could soon resort to illegal use of non-conventional weapons – meaning chemical, biological or low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons – to break Ukraine’s resistance.
Chemical weapons, notably the sarin nerve agent and chlorine gas, delivered by rockets or dropped as bombs, were repeatedly used against Syrian civilians. In Ghouta, outside Damascus, as many as 1,700 people died in sarin attacks in 2013. The Syrian and Russian governments denied responsibility and described the atrocity as an opposition “false flag” operation to discredit them.
US and British officials fear history may be repeating itself following fabricated claims by the Kremlin, irresponsibly repeated by China, that the US is secretly operating bio-weapons laboratories in Ukraine. Russia is now suggesting any release, deliberate or accidental, of chemical or biological agents during the fighting would thus be America’s fault.
The fear is that the convoluted lies at the heart of this latest “false flag” operation are intended to obscure the imminent use of banned chemical or biological weapons by Russia itself. The terrible injuries to victims aside, such weapons have proven capacity to terrorise entire populations. This is their true value to a mass killer such as Putin, desperate to prevail by any means.
However deluded or crazed he may be, Putin must be made to understand how unacceptable any such escalation would be. Possibly he recalls Barack Obama’s lamentable failure in 2013, after the Ghouta attack, to impose the “enormous consequences” he had threatened if his “red line” opposing chemical weapons use was crossed. Possibly Putin thinks the west will bottle it again.
Boris Johnson and Joe Biden evidently remember the “red line” fiasco, too. While expressing grave concern, Britain and the US have refused to say exactly what action, if any, they might take. That’s sensible, for now. We must hope that Putin is being told in no uncertain terms, through diplomatic back channels and perhaps by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, who still talks to him, that he goes down this path at his utmost peril.
It’s plain that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are being committed daily by Russia. All those responsible should understand they will be held to account, however long it takes. There will be justice for Ukraine.
