"FOR THE CHILDREN"

I’ve made my living using words for over 40 years. The words usually come easily to me and I am good at describing things and events. Every once in awhile though, I run out of words, or the only words that come to me are strings of obscenities that would do an old Navy Chief proud to say that many bad words without repetition.

Tonight is one of those times.

When I saw the photograph of the Russian missile.

I’m talking about the missile that hit a train station where thousands of Ukrainians had gathered Friday, killing at least 50 and wounding dozens more in an attack on a crowd of mostly women and children trying to flee a new, looming Russian offensive in the country’s east. About 4,000 civilians were in and around the station at the time of the strike, heeding calls to leave the area before fighting intensifies in the Donbas region. They weren’t soldiers, they were people fleeing the terror of war.

What’s important in the photo of the remains of the short-range ballistic missile that was used in the attack is that spraypainted on it are the Russian words “For The Children.”

The attack wasn’t some accident; the strike at the railroad station wasn’t “collateral damage” from an attempt to hit a legitimate military target.

The missile was aimed at the station intentionally. The station was the target. Those who fired it knew there were children in the station; childen who would likely be harmed in the resulting explosion.

They did it on purpose, and they laughed about what they were doing while they spraypainted “For The Children” on the missile before they fired it.

They meant it to happen as it did.

“There are almost no words for it,” European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is on a visit to Ukraine, told reporters. “The cynical behavior (by Russia) has almost no benchmark anymore.”

Timothy Snyder recently observed, writing about the Russian “genocide manual” that was published at RIA Novosti of which I published a translation earlier this week:

“For anyone still out there who believes that Putin's Russia opposes the extreme right in Ukraine or anywhere else, the genocide program is a chance to reconsider. Putin's Russian regime talks of ‘Nazis’ not because it opposes the extreme right, which it most certainly does not, but as a rhetorical device to justify unprovoked war and genocidal policies. Putin’s regime IS the extreme right. It is the world center of fascism. It supports fascists and extreme-right authoritarians around the world. In traducing the meaning of words like ‘Nazi,’ Putin and his propagandists are creating more rhetorical and political space for fascists in Russia and elsewhere.

“The actual history of actual Nazis and their actual crimes in the 1930s and 1940s is thus totally irrelevant and completely cast aside. This is perfectly consistent with Russian warfighting in Ukraine. No tears are shed in the Kremlin over Russian killing of Holocaust survivors or Russian destruction of Holocaust memorials, because Jews and the Holocaust have nothing to do with the Russian definition of ‘Nazi.’ This explains why Volodymyr Zelens'kyi, although a democratically-elected president, and a Jew with family members who fought in the Red Army and died in the Holocaust, can be called a Nazi. Zelens'kyi, is a Ukrainian, and that is all that ‘Nazi’ means.”

Looking at the footage from Bucha has changed my view of Russia and Russians completely. And not for the better. Joe Biden was right. This man cannot be allowed to remain in power.

Here’s a description from Der Spiegel:

“Irina Gavrilyuk, 42, has returned home. But what does it mean to return when there can be no going back to the way things were? Irina’s house on Ivan Franko Street is still standing, to be sure. But everything in and around it is dead. The bodies of three men, all shot dead, are lying in her yard. One of them is Sergei, Irina’s husband. Another is Roman, Irina’s brother. She doesn’t know who the third man is. Irina’s dogs are also dead. One of them was shot and is lying in the wheelbarrow, the other is in the destroyed doghouse. "They destroyed all life," says Irina. "How can I move back here?"

“The last time Irina saw him was on March 5. The war had been underway for just over a week by then. "When the warplanes flew overhead, the whole house shook," she says. She left the city that day, but Sergei stayed behind. He didn’t want to abandon the animals they had taken in: two dogs and six cats. Irina fled across the Irpin River and onward to western Ukraine. Ten days later, she received a final call from her brother: "Don’t worry," he told her.

“She doesn’t know why Sergei and Roman were killed. Neighbors told her that the third man in her yard had been shot by the Russians because he had ventured out onto the street while searching for better mobile phone reception. The occupiers were wary of men speaking on the phone, fearful that they could be passing along coordinates for an artillery attack. Any man under the age of 60 was in danger of being shot, says Irina. Inside the house, the presence of her husband’s murderers is still felt like a shadow: The Russians lived in her bedroom as the dead bodies decomposed outside.

“Overnight, Bucha became synonymous with the brand of warfare that Putin is pursuing in Ukraine. Just as the world once had to learn the names Srebrenica and Račak to discuss atrocities committed in Bosnia and in Kosovo, it is now learning the name Bucha. Bucha means that in Ukraine, Putin’s Russia is prepared to follow the blueprint it established in Chechnya and Syria. And in doing so, it is prepared to gamble away its own self-image.”

This following story from the article is important because it shows what the early success of resistance meant for Ukraine:

“But in the meantime, Russian ground troops had arrived from Belarus in the north, charged with pushing southward in preparation for the encirclement of the capital. With that, the war came directly from Hostomel to Bucha. A long column of tanks and armored vehicles drove through the city and had almost left it again when it was shot to pieces in Vokzalna Street. Gun turrets and tank tracks flew into the yards lining the street and the vehicles were gutted by flames. It was an astonishing precision strike in an urban area.

“Some residents joined in the fighting as well. One of them was Ruslan, whose name has been changed for this story. A 50-year-old former police officer, Ruslan has a poorly stitched scar running up from his left ear across his head. Like other men in his part of town, he was furious about the Russian attack and exhilarated at the Ukrainian army’s victory. “Some men ran over to see what had happened and to kill Russians,” he says. “Those who didn’t belong to the army or to the Territorial Defense Forces wanted to get their hands on a Kalashnikov or hand grenades.”

“Ruslan claims that he also killed a Russian whose armored vehicle had been hit. Since he didn’t have a weapon, he strangled him. “It just happened. I guess it had to be that way,” he says. When he jumped down from the armored vehicle, Russian soldiers fired on him and a bullet grazed his head, slicing open his scalp.

You can read the rest here, but don’t do it just after you’ve eaten or just before going to bed:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/a-closer-look-at-the-russian-atrocities-in-bucha-do-you-want-to-die-quickly-or-slowly-a-513b1e84-0e3a-42e9-bf17-d90e0ef9b119

I’ll let Dr. Snyder have the last word:

“As a historian of mass killing, I am hard pressed to think of many examples where states explicitly advertise the genocidal character of their own actions right at the moment those actions become public knowledge. From a legal perspective, the existence of such a text (in the larger context of similar statements and Vladimir Putin's repeated denial that Ukraine exists) makes the charge of genocide far easier to make. Legally, genocide means both actions that destroy a group in whole or in part, combined with some intention to do so. Russia has done the deed and confessed to the intention.”

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