R Johansen
Hindustan Times
comments
Comments by "R Johansen" (@rjohansen9486) on "Angry Putin's Open u0026 Direct 'Carpet Bombing' Threat To Ukraine; 'Russia Can Strike Ukrainian...'" video.
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Moscow denies attacking Ukrainian civilians, but the recent torrent of strikes on Kyiv suggest a concerted strategy with clear objectives. Russian missiles and drones rained down on the Ukrainian capital 17 times in May. That's equivalent to a near non-stop rate of once every two days.
While Moscow was hit by a rare attack on Tuesday, Russia's relentless strikes point to a concerted campaign to bombard Ukrainian civilians. But why do this? The Kremlin denies deliberately targeting civilians - which can be considered a war crime under international law - however the UN estimated in May that more than 24,000 non-combatants had been killed since fighting began last February.
Russian strikes have also been documented against hospitals, schools, maternity wards, theatres - the grim list goes on. "It's terror bombing," Dr Jade McGlynn, Research Fellow in War Studies at King's College London, told Euronews. "The purpose is to make Ukrainians feel unsafe and place them under considerable psychological pressure." Behind Russia's "terror" campaign lies a clear objective, says McGlynn. "The ultimate intention is to break the will of the population so that they will at some point give in and accept Russia," she explained, claiming it was personally "directed" by the Russian President.
"Putin believes the West will give up and Ukrainians will just be grateful for an end to the terror." "Civilians have always been targeted in all of Russia's wars," said McGlynn. "It's long been understood that civilians are collateral damage." "They've never had much care for individual human life." Ahead of the Second Chechen War in 1999, Russia launched a devastating bombing campaign against breakaway Chechnya, reducing vast areas to rubble and forcing at least 100,000 to flee their homes.
Russian airstrikes have also hammered rebel-held areas in Syria's ongoing civil war, with Human Rights Watch describing them as "reckless, indiscriminate and deliberately targeting civilians". In Ukraine, McGlynn says Russia's willingness to indiscriminately bombard civilian areas stems from a colonial view of the country. "For Russia, there are two types of Ukrainians: The good little brother/ sort of sidekick who speaks Russian... and the bad Ukrainians who embrace Ukrainian identity." "That's who they want to destroy".
Aljazeera: Putin targets Ukrainian civilians because he could in Syria. The Syrianisation of the Ukraine war is no coincidence. Russia got away with it once — and believes it will again. In 2015, when Russia began its military intervention in Syria, it seemed that the barbarism in the region was too significant for the international community to turn away from. Abundant reports by United Nations commissions, as well as accountability, human rights, and humanitarian organisations, documented war crimes with pictures, videos, and firsthand testimony.
The world has watched countless incidents of missiles destroying hospitals or mutilated Syrian children covered in dust and blood being pulled from the rubble of destroyed apartment buildings. By some accounts, the documentation of war crimes in Syria is the strongest evidence since the crimes of the Nazis in World War II. And yet, the international community failed to act. No one was held accountable. Syria was a test case for the resolve of the world on how to respond to a brutal aggressor that justifies attacking civilians and hospitals. Inaction in Syria gave Putin the green light to start another brutal war to swallow another big chunk of territory from his neighbor, Ukraine.
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@lagubrok92 Why these lies about Donbas over and over again??! You're delusional, and your double standards and hypocrisy are off the scale!
THERE WAS NO GENOCIDE IN DONBAS.
From Iranian press: Vladimir Putin regularly drone on about the alleged “genocide of the Donbas population”. Today, this myth sits at the core of the Kremlin’s propaganda. Putin has used this myth to justify Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. " Its goal is to protect people who have been subjected to abuse and genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years” Putin said in his address announcing the war.
Both Ukraine and the occupied Donbas territories have suffered casualties because of the HOSTILITIES THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION has been conducting there since 2014. But Russia has insisted for these eight years and tried to convince the world that the actions of Ukraine’s Armed Forces in Donbas “are aimed at destroying the population of Donbas” and are not a struggle for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. And despite the UNTRUTHFULNESS of the argument, Russia’s propaganda machine has nevertheless managed to convince the Russian audience of this, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is “an act of retaliation for Donbas”.
As it happens, official United Nations data suggests that the 14,000 casualty figure that Putin has used does not only refer to civilians. During Russia’s 2014-2021 military operations against Ukraine, 14,500 people died in the Donbas war. Of that 14,000, 3,404 were civilians, 4,400 were Ukrainian servicemen and 6,500 were Russian militants. The figure Putin operates with, is the total number of casualties incurred in the Donbas war by both sides.
(According to UN and Human Rights Watch reports, 3,400 civilians have died in Donbas since 2014. And 84 percent of them were killed by Russian and separatist artillery. Read the reports! The vast majority of deaths were in the first two years of the war (2014 and 2015))
The Russian Federation both armed the separatists and sent unmarked soldiers. Russia initially denied that there were Russian military forces in Donbas, but on 17 April 2014 Vladimir Putin finally confirmed the presence of the Russian military. Alexander Borodai, Prime Minister of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic, stated that 50,000 RUSSIAN citizens fought in the Donbas up to August 2015.
THESE SOLDIERS are the ones that the Ukranian government fought against, NOT “shelling of innocents in Donbas”, which Russian propaganda will tell you.
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