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As international media arrived in the Kiev suburb of Bucha on April 2, they were greeted with a scene out of a dystopic movie. Not only were buildings destroyed, but the streets were also littered with the corpses of civilians. Moreover, further investigation revealed extensive evidence of war crimes beyond the prima facie case already proven against Putin and his cronies for planning an aggressive war.

Her neighbours in a neat brick house four doors down had been tied hand and foot and killed. Down the road, territorial defence fighters said they had found a basement where 18 bodies, men, women and children as young as 14 lay dead, their bodies mutilated.

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Two days earlier, Torovik said, he had seen a dog eating a woman’s body that had been left on the ground. Yet the worst was in the basement of the dacha.

“We found 18 bodies in there,” he said. “They had been torturing people. Some of them had their ears cut off. Others had teeth pulled out. There were kids like 14, 16 years old, some adults. They just took the bodies away yesterday.”

Take a trip into one such execution chamber.

Read The Ukrainian Army Liberates Territory From Russian Invaders and Discovers Murdered Civilians and Shocking Evidence of Mass-Scale Russian War Crimes Raises the Stakes in Ukraine for more details.

The EU is calling for an investigation.

Of course, the Russians claim that Bucha was in pristine condition when they left and that it must be the nazis they were fighting who did the damage. No, that is not a parody; that is the actual position taken by a government that claims, against all evidence, to be civilized.

This response shows why the Russians are so terrible at responding to a crisis. As it is illegal, and sometimes fatal, to contradict the official Moscow narrative inside Russia, they are used to just making sh** up.  For instance, Ukrainian troops didn’t enter Bucha until March 31, and as late as April 1, the city was still the scene of combat operations to drive out Russian stragglers and looters. Independent media arrived on April 1, when the first reports from Bucha started appearing on social media.

Anyone who is shocked by this or, worse yet, trying to pretend it didn’t happen. This is what the Russian military, with or without Putin, does and how it operates.

In Mariupol, the Russians bombarded a theater where civilians were sheltering. The word “CHILDREN” was printed in Russian in huge white letters outside. An effort to discourage aerial attack may have actually invited it. Some 300 people in the building were reported killed by Russian bombs on March 16.

But it is one thing to kill civilians with bombs and missiles. It is another to kill them with bullets to the back of the head. This is a different level of evil — the kind of organized atrocity that Europe has not seen since the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995. Russia’s “anti-Nazi” operation has led Russian troops to act precisely as the Nazis once did. If there is any justice in the world, Russian war criminals, from Putin on down, will someday face the kind of justice that the Nazis received at Nuremberg.

This, sadly, is the Russian way of war. It is how Putin’s forces fought in Chechnya and Syria — and before that, how Soviet forces fought in Afghanistan and in central Europe during World War II. They commit war crimes to terrorize the population into surrender. But it hasn’t worked in Ukraine. Russia’s savagery has simply caused the Ukrainians to resist all the harder because they know they are fighting not just for their freedom but for their very survival.

.As other occupied cities are liberated, the same story will be revealed. Russian soldiers looted without restraint and engaged in rape and murder as the mood hit them. We can expect some particularly horrible images to appear if Ukraine retains Mariupol. The Russians led off their assault by openly promising to commit war crimes if the defenders didn’t lay down their arms; see Mariupol Defenders Reject Russian Demand for Surrender Setting up the Largest Siege of a City Since WWII. The so-called Wagner Group is now employed in rear area operations in Donbas. They have been implicated in massacres in the Central African Republic and Mali. You can bet they will run true to form.

There is slim hope that any of the major perpetrators of this horror will ever be held to account. Even though Putin, Shoigu, and Gerasimov have long since breached the threshold for war crimes using the standard of Nuremberg or the Yamashita trial, they are outside the reach of justice. They can be inconvenienced by travel restrictions and personal sanctions, but they will never stand trial for their crimes.

A second-best solution is to document the units serving in areas like Bucha. Thanks to a massive data breach, we can identify at least 120,000 Russian soldiers and their units of assignment thanks to a hack by “Anonymous.”

Soldiers serving with targeted units should be targeted for arrest if they ever leave Russia. The same applies to Russian commanders serving in Ukraine. They are all liable for any war crime that took place under their command, which they did not investigate and prosecute. As General Yamashita found out, it isn’t even necessary to have been informed about the war crimes to be convicted for committing them.

The Russian Army is not a professional military. We must stop regarding it as such and treat it as the criminal enterprise that it is.

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