'The wider reality of the terrible suffering in Ukraine is not that it is an unprecedently brutal war but that it is all too typical of the wars fought in recent decades.'
Something singularly unexpected happened in the war in Ukraine last weekend. After more than six weeks of artillery fire and missiles raining down on Kyiv, combined with slow ground encroachment by armour and infantry, Russian forces suddenly withdrew over 2-3 April. Their retreat was anything but orderly and left behind huge destruction, with ever more evidence emerging of troops torturing, raping and killing civilians.
The wider reality of the terrible suffering in Ukraine is not that it is an unprecedently brutal war but that it is all too typical of the wars fought in recent decades. All the atrocities seen in Ukraine—wilful killing of civilians, hostage-taking, human shields, mass slaughter and more—have been carried out in other wars, often with intense loss of life, extending to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.
This still leaves us short of explaining the appalling behaviour of Russian troops and who should be held responsible, a theme I explored peripherally last week inincluding the destruction of Fallujah and the old city of Mosul. 'Strap those mother-----s to the hood like a deer,' said Staff Sgt. James Robinson, 25, of Hughes, Arkansas.
The American soldiers involved, on the other hand, felt they were fighting a war against a state they believed partly responsible for the 9/11 massacres. What's more, they had found the fight far more difficult than expected and many of their comrades in arms had been killed or terribly injured by people who were out to kill them.
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