A “safari [russe] in Ukraine “. The image used Monday by the mayor of Boutcha, Anatoly Fedoruk, to describe the abuses perpetrated by the armed forces of Vladimir Putin on Ukrainian civilians during the occupation of his city is striking.
On the waves of the American network CNN, the man said he believed the Russian military had received a “green light” from the Kremlin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to commit the atrocities revealed two days ago following the departure of the occupier from Kyiv region. “They couldn’t take the city, so they expressed their frustration on Boutcha and the surrounding area” by killing civilians “indiscriminately”, he said while denouncing Moscow’s “cynicism”.
A horror which reveals itself to the face of the world body after body, in the suburbs of the Ukrainian capital, while carrying however the very slim hope of seeing the indignation which it arouses on an international scale radically change the course of this war which, since last February 24, has been sinking ever deeper into inhumanity.
“The images that come to us from Ukraine are unbearable and call even more on the West to react to put an end to this conflict by opposing Putin’s Russia, summarizes in an interview with the Homework retired Colonel Pierre St-Cyr, former Canadian Defense Attaché in Ukraine during the Russian invasion of 2014. But the risks of bringing this conflict beyond the borders of the former Soviet republic to see it spread to the rest of the European continent are still very high, and this should not encourage NATO to change its position. »
“The geostrategic logic that opposes direct military intervention by the West has not changed,” said American historian Devin Pendas, a war crimes specialist at Boston College, joined in Massachusetts. Russia still has nearly 6,000 nuclear weapons, and no one is going to risk the outbreak of a nuclear war, no matter how barbaric the Russian soldiers may have been. »
The toll on the massacres of civilians by the Russian armed forces continued to darken on Monday, as Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova announced on the country’s national television that discoveries made in the town of Borodyanka, neighbor of Boutcha, were preparing to be “worse” than those of the last few days. His office has also opened an investigation after finding the bodies of five men in the suburbs of kyiv, “unarmed civilians”, “tortured”, then “killed” in the basement of a children’s hospital. .
These victims add to the long list of “war crimes” meticulously documented by Ukraine, much more to hold the perpetrators responsible for them than to make them the breaking point in this invasion which, since February 24, has turns into a war of attrition.
“Tragically, publicity around massacres during a conflict does not change the meaning of a war”, continues Mr. Pendas, referring as much to the abuses revealed during the genocide in Rwanda as to the massacres of civilians and large-scale rapes perpetrated. in 1937 by the Japanese army in the Chinese city of Nanjing. A tragedy documented by American missionaries at the time, but which opened the door only to the expression of the indignation of the United States addressed to the diplomatic mission of Japan in Washington.
“Japan in the 1930s, like Russia today, was a powerful imperial state, which seemed too dangerous to attack directly,” recalls the historian. There were isolated protests and relief efforts, but no significant intervention in this Second Sino-Japanese War. »
He says that the rare NATO interventions after the massacres in Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya were made under the guise of humanitarian intervention, of course, but when the perpetrators of the crimes were “small states that were militarily weak and diplomatically isolated “.
Concert of indignation
Incidentally, on Monday, Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi strongly condemned the “exceptionally cruel acts of violence against civilians [qui] took place near kyiv”. He did so following a meeting with his Polish counterpart, Zbigniew Rau, in Warsaw, adding his voice to the concert of indignation fueled by the international community, the day after the massive discoveries of the murders of civilians on the Ukrainian territory.
“What happened over the weekend is completely scandalous, unjustifiable and shocking,” said Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly during a press briefing on the sidelines of her trip to Finland. In the process, Ottawa announced its intention to impose new sanctions “on nine Russians and nine Belarusians for facilitating and enabling violations of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of Ukraine” while n the afternoon, federal deputies adopted a motion condemning “crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Ukraine”.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan promised “announcements of additional military assistance in the coming days” for Ukraine, without further details and without announcing a change in strategy. American in this conflict.
seeing is believing
“The massacre of civilians in Ukraine could change public opinion and strengthen the opposition movement to this war, but for that, the images would also have to be broadcast in Russia, which is not the case”, maintains Pierre St-Cyr, recalling in passing the mobilizing effect of the My Lai massacre, in Vietnam, in 1968, against the war waged in this Asian country by the United States.
Between 350 and 500 civilians, including women, children and infants, had been massacred in unprecedented violence by a battalion of the American army in this village in the Quang Ngãi region. The tragedy, brought to light more than a year later after an attempted cover-up, aroused the anger and indignation of Americans. “When the horror of war started to be broadcast on television in the evening, at supper time, people ended up calling their leaders to account. »
Such a scenario, however, remains unlikely as on Monday, the head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov, continued to describe as “false” the images of the bodies of civilians murdered and mutilated in the kyiv region, reiterating in passing the accusations of the Kremlin. against a campaign of “propaganda” and “disinformation” orchestrated by Ukraine, according to Moscow.
An alternative reality which should continue to contradict the facts and the images coming from other cities of Ukraine, liberated from the Russians, estimated Monday the mayor of Boutcha, Anatoli Fedorouk. “We can expect to see the same scenes all over the country, in kyiv, in Mariupol, in Kherson…”, he said on the airwaves of CNN. ” [Les Russes] cannot advance militarily, because the Ukrainian Armed Forces have arrested them, so they are torturing civilians. That’s how they behave. It is the so-called denazification of Ukraine sold by Russian President Vladimir Putin, but which is in fact only the dehumanization of Ukrainians. »
With Agence France-Presse