OPINION: Suffering of children an especially ugly element of war

The war in Ukraine has escalated into a bloodbath, with civilians, mostly women and children, targeted in areas and structures the Russians have believed they would be hiding.

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Schools, train stations and apartment buildings where civilians would gather to escape the shelling, have been targeted, even a building that was marked on the grounds with the words that children were there suffered the same fate.

It made no difference, and, as expected, Russian officials flatly deny their involvement in any such atrocities and deemed them fake. Reading between the lines, in their denials, and accusations that the images of corpses, mass graves and destruction, are also fake, and likely instrumented by Ukraine forces.

These tactics aren’t new, but in this age of technology, cellphones with excellent cameras, video and voice recording, events are being captured in real life and real time.

The images coming out of Ukraine encapsulate what one would identify as war crimes in general, and genocide in particular. Now Putin has a new appointment in Gen. Aleksandr Dvorknikov, who is known for his merciless warfare tactics.

CNN reported that he is known as the butcher of Syria, when Russian forces went to the aid of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2015 to crush the rebels there. It has been documented that war crimes occurred against civilians.

But still, Russia disputes what seems like the obvious. As history shows, this isn’t likely to change, even as accusations from Ukrainians and the western allies about war crimes mount.

Surviving civilians, desperately trying to escape, recently accused Russian soldiers of indiscriminate acts of murder, torture, rape, mass graves, burned corpses. Cellphone images showed the carnage.

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In an interview with CTV’s Evan Solomon on Power Play, Kira Rudyk, MP and leader of the Ukrainian liberal pro Europe Holos Party, described what she saw in Bucha with her own eyes.

It was once again shocking to see human beings treating their fellow human beings with barbaric and insubordinate torture, rape and cold-blooded murder with the only focus trained on extermination where all presence on earth is wiped out.

Rudyk described with intense emotion and, to her credit, a well-articulated documentation of the horrors of genocide involving women, children and the elderly.

She described mass graves of up to 300, women, men and children with hands tied behind their backs. It was total genocide with the bodies of women being burned in order to hide their rapes.

It was total genocide, with civilians who just lived there, survivors raped in front of their children. Worse yet were the images of a targeted building where residents were burnt alive.

Once again, the Russians deny their involvement and insist all of this is staged by the Ukrainians. But it is more than obvious that genocide and war crimes are rampant and very hard to believe that Russia is an innocent bystander.

The images that accompanied the interview were sickening and left one wondering how some human beings can become so invested in irrational hatred that they can gang rape women and children then burn the bodies. How can they murder indiscriminately? Is this what war does?

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To date, over 5,000 alleged war crimes have been identified, and Russian forces are where the accusations are being levelled at. Genocide is another more chilling accusation and carries a strict definition of its meaning.

Ukraine is accusing Russia of using mobile crematoria to get rid of the bodies of the civilians they have tortured, murdered and raped. Now the possible use of chemical weapons by Russia in Mariupol, has not yet been proven but is being investigated.

An article published for the United Nations Genocide Prevention and Responsibility to Protect website is quite revealing.

Article 11 of The Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition on the crime of genocide. It is of particular importance and lists acts to be defined as genocide when committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.

The five acts constituting genocide are as follows: killing members of the group, causing bodily or mental harm to the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group and forcibly transferring children of the group to other groups.

The revolting acts and war crimes against Ukrainian civilians are being videoed in real time and real life. They are genocide by way of definition. War creates liars, so who is lying in this war?

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I suggest a good read by Lucy Ash, for BBC News-Berlin, dated May 1, 2015. Her piece, The Rape of Berlin gives a very detailed account of the former USSR’s role in the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

The parallels between the atrocities being committed in Ukraine today and those by the Soviet soldiers 70 years ago are chilling. Death, rape, torture, mass murder and the guttural urge to exterminate the identity of the enemy are savage reminders of humanity’s underbelly in war.

According to Ash’s research, the Soviet’s role in the defeat of the Nazis was seen as that nation’s most glorious moment. But there are also documented accounts of mass rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers, towards the end of the war.

Eighty thousand Soviet troops died between April 16 and May 2, 1945. Ash said the atrocities were rarely mentioned in Germany, the West the East and were taboo in USSR. Still today, Russia says talk of the rapes are a Western myth.

One of the numerous sources, which tells the story of what happened, came from a diary kept by a young Soviet officer named Vladimir Gelfand. He was a Jewish lieutenant from Central Ukraine, who wrote in his diary from 1941 to the end of the war.

He describes miserable conditions for his comrades where rations were deplorable, there was lice infestations, venereal diseases, theft, steeling and rape. He writes how his unit, on its final assault on Berlin, overpowered a battalion of female German fighters who were apparently avenging their dead husbands.

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The soldiers wanted to stab them through their genitals, but exterminating them was better. Once they reached Berlin, he heard of gang rapes, 20 men at a time at the mothers and then their daughters.

But he also went on to write that German soldiers had also been guilty of sexual violence and unspeakable horrors in their USSR invasion during the four previous years of the Second World War. He said the Nazis killed everyone, including children. They were rapists.

The document reveals the intriguing perversions of war. It reveals how women and their children have been used to as pawns in order to get back at the enemy. The gruesome outcomes and collateral damage span generations and historical documentations make no room for error.

Women and their kids have been bargaining chips throughout history when the red line in war becomes the losing one because they carry their babies to birth, nurture

them and propagate the species. Rape is catastrophic, as the most intimate and reproductive parts of the body are violated beyond healing. It is power and hate. Children of war are written off as reproductive garbage, enslaved and abused.

Elders are massacred and with them goes the historical stories, the culture, identity and guidance. Those who flee lose everything except what is on their backs. They are lost souls, searching for a home, as home is in rubbles along with museums, schools, sacred places and libraries, public records. Anything connecting them to who they are is gone. Their keepsakes, photos, valuables are rendered to ashes along with their homes, their safe places.

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Genocide has five aspects in its definition, and they have all been an integral part of Russia’s invasion and illegal attack on Ukraine, so the extermination of its citizens and their identity can be fulfilled.

Vitaly Gelfand, son of Red Army diarist Vladimir Gelfand, knows many Soviet soldiers showed bravery, but he said this is not the whole story.

“If people don’t want to know the truth, they’re just deluding themselves,” he said. “The entire world understands it. Russia understands it and the people behind those new laws about defaming the past, even they understand it. We can’t move forward until we look back.”

Patricia Baker is a Sault Star district correspondent, columnist and retired Sault Area Hospital nurse

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Патриция Бейкер - корреспондент, обозреватель и медсестра районной больницы Sault Star на пенсии.