First, the relief. Around Kyiv, the Russian army retreats. The troops fall back, after having shelled, then occupied the suburbs of the capital. The noose loosens and, for a brief moment, we begin to hope that Ukraine has avoided the worst.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
And then the horror. The Russian soldiers gone, we discover with horror what they leave behind. Scenes of unspeakable cruelty. Brutal, unbearable images.
These are the images that history will retain of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. They will forever be associated with this despot. They will be his legacy.
Since Saturday, the photos have been parading, ever more numerous, ever more shocking. But you have to see them. You have to look at them. Because they say what is happening, day after day, hour after hour, in Ukraine.
A hand with red, dirty and broken fingernails. Next to it, a key ring in the colors of the European Union. Like a dream of escape – or protection – shattered in the most cruel of ways.
Streets littered with corpses, left where they fell.
A man with his hands tied behind his back, his head in a pool of blood.
Another lying on the asphalt, a twisted bicycle between his legs. Killed while riding a bicycle.
An old man sprawled in the street, his head resting on the sidewalk, as if taking a nap.
Four or five naked women, piled up and burned on a pile of tires.
Dislocated, bleeding bodies, half buried in a mass grave.
These images speak. No, they are screaming: there was a butcher’s shop in Boutcha, a small town in the north-west of Kyiv. Unfortunately, we are only just beginning to document the war crimes that have been perpetrated there.
You also need to understand why.
Why such barbarism? What human beings can inflict that on other human beings?
It happened on March 4. The Russian soldiers had gathered about forty civilians, mostly women and elders, in a square in Boutcha. They ordered five young men to take off their boots and jackets. They made them kneel by the side of the road and pulled their t-shirts up over their heads.
Then they shot one of them in the neck.
” He fell. The women were screaming,” a witness told Human Rights Watch. The body published a chilling report on Sunday, in which it documents war crimes committed by the Russian army in Ukraine – including rape and summary executions.
On the place of Boutcha, the Russian commander wanted to reassure people in panic after the execution of the young man: “Don’t worry. You’re all normal – and that’s dirt. We are here to clean you from dirt. »
To clean. Purify. Appalling words that do not surprise Greg Yudin. For two years, this Moscow sociologist has been warning the world against a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Unfortunately, the Boutcha massacre does not surprise him either. People underestimate the Kremlin’s rhetoric to justify the war in Ukraine, he explained on Twitter on Sunday. This rhetoric seems so strange to us that we tend to ignore it.
And yet, the Russians firmly believe in it. They believe in the denazification of Ukraine.
Initially, the official Russian rhetoric was that the Nazis had seized power in Ukraine; it was enough to overthrow the regime for everything to return to normal.
But the Ukrainians resisted. Then, the official discourse changed: the Ukrainian population was revealed to be deeply infected by Nazism. “Therefore, writes Greg Yudin, liberation means purification. »
On the ground, Russian soldiers imagine that they are there to denazify Ukraine. They obviously imagine that those who resist them are Nazis. They imagine they are there to clean up the country with bullets in the back of the neck.
In the same way that the Nazis, in the past, imagined purifying Germany…
Let’s hope that after this war, as soon as possible, the butchers of Ukraine will be entitled to their Nuremberg trial. And that Vladimir Putin will be in the dock.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has welcomed the opening of an investigation by the International Criminal Court into war crimes committed in Ukraine.
In turn, Washington, Paris, Berlin and London denounced the Boutcha massacre on Sunday. “Those responsible for these deliberate and appalling attacks will be brought to justice,” promised Justin Trudeau.
The Prime Minister is not mistaken: these attacks are deliberate. The destruction and carnage we are seeing as Russian troops retreat is no sad skid. They have nothing of a mistake.
They are part of a war strategy, tested many times by Vladimir Putin. An inhuman, but terribly effective tactic: using terror to force the population into submission.
Besiege a city. Cut her off from the rest of the world. Target civilians. Bomb residential areas. It has already been seen. In Grozny. In Aleppo. And, now, to Mariupol.
Bombing a refuge, where they had taken the trouble to write CHILDREN in white letters, to warn the Russian air force. Despite this, the soldiers dropped their bomb on the Mariupol theater on March 16. In spite of that or… because of that.
Mariupol is undergoing what Grozny suffered in 1995: annihilation. Day after day, Vladimir Putin’s army is working to wipe him off the map.
We must break the morale of the residents by all means, even the most atrocious. Already, 5,000 residents of Mariupol have lost their lives. Nearly 160,000 more are still stranded in the city, or what’s left of it. Without water, without electricity, without food, without medicines. Hopeless.
A terrible humanitarian disaster is taking place right now in Mariupol. And when the Russian troops withdraw from the ruined city, the world will be treated to other unbearable images. Images that will have to be added to the indictment of Vladimir Putin.