The Villainy Is the Point

Putin’s war crimes are the continuation of a sinister tradition that dates back to the czars.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks on March 21, 2023, in Moscow, Russia. (Photo by Contributor/Getty Images)

Vladimir Putin and his war machine get more respect than they deserve from the West.

This may seem a bit counterintuitive. After all, just 9 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Russia, and the International Criminal Court recently issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes.  

But if you listen to a lot of the debate over Ukraine, you might be forgiven for thinking Putin’s invasion was just a bad mistake, badly implemented by an otherwise serious country. Sure, terrible things are happening in Ukraine, but terrible things happen in war. What’s left out is that the terrible things are the policy, not the unintended consequence of it.

Reports of torture and rape started pouring in from the earliest days of the invasion. In March 2022, Russian troops electrocuted the genitals of male civilian prisoners and sexually brutalized girls and women from age 4 to 82. 

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  1. Dale Deason

    Where else in the world do we find this barbarism? Everywhere except the West? Khmer Rouge, Idi Amin, the Comanche?

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    Ben Connelly

    Supposedly in occupied Berlin, close to 100% of German women were raped by Russians. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration (seems it must be), but Russian propaganda was certainly instructing Russian soldiers to do that to German women above all (to punish Germany).

    Weirdos on the fringe post-liberal right see Russia as the last bastion of civilization. More like the antithesis of civilization if you ask me.

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  3. Runyan.Jason

    I knew of the horrific behavior of the Soviet army, but never knew this extent. This is vile and appalling. This article needs to be printed as leaflets and dropped all over Russia. And screw international law, Putin needs to be eliminated, preferably with his own polonium 210.

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    Michael Falciani

    But Tuck told us he’s not bad…just misunderstood! Plus…HE FIGHTS!

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  5. Mary Stine

    More proof, if any needed, that the Putin lovers in this country are either grossly uniformed or secretly sadistic, or both.
    God knows we are not without character flaws or mistakes, but in general most Americans care about preserving human life and are against cruelty, especially that directed to children.
    We make multiple efforts to improve, although often these seem fruitless.
    There are times, however, when we make headway. We were fortunate to have had Martin Luther King, Jr. and his devoted followers in nonviolence.

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  6. Lrhubbard09

    I know he was nutty, but George Patton pretty much nailed the Russians in his comments at the end of WW II. The Russian leadership especially has been a consistent group of SOBs. I believe in being at peace if at all possible, but it seems impossible to ever have a lasting peace w/Russia.

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    1. GenZConservative

      That's one of my favorite thought experiments. What if he had been promoted to command the European theater, and could have finagled a reason to roll on to Moscow? What a different world we would live in.

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      1. Lrhubbard09

        Given the war in the Pacific, going to Moscow would be seen as too costly. But if we could have just unified Germany I believe the Soviet System would have collapsed a lot sooner. When I was a teenager I remember talking to an old German soldier who fought on the Russian front. He said everyone who had any ability to move desperately tried to get to the American front.

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        1. Paulkempf

          My barber was around kindergarten age and living near Leipzig when the Russians invaded. His mother fled west with him until they found an American unit. They joined a flock of refugees who followed the Americans for safety, exposed to the elements and to German fire (this was still wartime; Americans were still under assault by German forces). To bivouac with a unit under those conditions because that was your best option illustrates the terror that the Red Army inspired.

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  7. Jack.Kay

    Finally, an article that points out the time honored brutality of Russia, Czarist, Communist, whatever. In 1916 they burned my then nine-year-old father's village to the ground for no reason other than it was there.

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    Earl King

    There are people who believe the American military is just as evil along with the government that it works for. Surely the equating of "Russia is no worse than the US”, must give some comfort those who seek to harm the US by the fairly regular release of classified documents. We generally hear a constant refrain that the US is a bad country acting badly.

    One is left with this question. Why is it that the US is compared to the worst rather than the best? My question after that is who is best? In looking fairly at other countries in the world we all know that the French, the British, the Germans, the Japanese, et al have had accusations of mistreating populations in their past.

    It is pretty hard to find any culture who when engaged in war hasn’t acted badly at one time or another. Therefore does the question comes down to simply a measure of how badly, how often?

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  9. Jfan

    I've taken to calling all post-1918 Russian gangsters Chekists, assuming that the NKVD, KGB, and FSB just carry on the Cheka's work under different names. Now I see that even the Cheka carried on a tradition.

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    WKDawson

    Yup.
    Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (the more things change, the more they stay the same.)

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