The atrocities in the Ukrainian war have deep roots within the Russian army

In a photograph of the suburb of Bucha, Ukraine, in Kiev, a woman finds herself in the courtyard of a house, with her hand covering her mouth in horror, the bodies of three dead civilians scattered before her. When Aset Chad saw that image, he began to tremble and went back 22 years in time.

In February 2000, she entered her neighbor's courtyard in Chechnya and caught a glimpse of the bodies of three men and one woman who had been shot repeatedly in front of their 8-year-old daughter. Russian soldiers swept their village and killed at least 60 people, raped at least six women and looted the victims' golden teeth, human rights observers discovered.

“I'm having the most severe memories,” said Chad, who now lives in New York, in a telephone interview. “I see exactly what is happening: I see the same army, the same Russian tactics they use, dehumanizing people.”

The brutality of Moscow's war against Ukraine takes two distinct forms, familiar to those who have seen the Russian army in action elsewhere.

There is the programmatic violence inflicted by Russian bombs and missiles on civilians and military targets, with the intention of both demoralizing and defeating. These attacks recall the aerial destruction in 1999 and 2000 of the Chechen capital of Grozny and, in 2016, of the Syrian rebel stronghold in Aleppo.

And then there is the cruelty of the soldiers and individual units, the horrors of Bucha seem to have descended directly from the massacre of a generation ago in the village of Chad, Novye Aldi.

Civilian deaths and crimes committed by soldiers feature in every war, especially those fought by the United States in recent decades in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has always been difficult to explain why soldiers commit atrocities, or to describe how commanders' orders, military culture, national propaganda, frustration on the battlefield and individual malice can come together to produce such horrors.

In Russia, however, such acts are rarely investigated or even recognized, let alone punished. That makes it unclear to what extent low-level brutality stems from the intention of those in charge or whether the commanders failed to control their troops. Combined with the apparent strategy of bombing civilian targets, many observers conclude that the Russian government, and perhaps a part of Russian society, actually condones violence against civilians.

Some analysts see the problem as structural and political, with the lack of accountability of the Russian armed forces magnified by the absence of independent institutions in the authoritarian system of Vladimir Putin or the previous Soviet Union. Compared to the West, fewer people harbor illusions that individual rights triumph over gross power.

“I think there is this kind of culture of violence,” said Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher. “You either dominate or you are dominated.”

In Ukraine, Russian soldiers, by all appearances, can continue to kill civilians with impunity, as evidenced by the fact that virtually none of the perpetrators of war crimes in Chechnya, where the Kremlin crushed an independence movement at the cost of tens of thousands of civilian lives, was prosecuted in Russia.

At the time, Russian investigators told Chad that the killings in Novye Aldi could have been perpetrated by Chechens disguised as Russian troops, he recalls. Now, the Kremlin says that any atrocity in Ukraine is staged or carried out by Ukrainians and their Western “bosses”, while denouncing as “Nazi” anyone who resists the Russian advance.

Many Russians believe such lies, while those who do not wonder how such crimes can be carried out on their behalf.

Violence remains commonplace within the Russian army, where older soldiers routinely abuse younger ones. Despite two decades of attempts to make the military a more professional force, it has never developed a strong middle level similar to non-commissioned officers who bridge the gap between commanders and lower-ranking soldiers in the US military. In 2019, a recruit in Siberia opened fire and killed eight at his military base, and then claimed that he had carried out the shooting because other soldiers had made his life “hell”.

Experts say that the severity of hazing in the Russian army has been reduced compared to the early 2000s, when it killed dozens of recruits every year. But they say that order in many units is still maintained through informal systems similar to abusive hierarchies in Russian prisons.

For Sergei Krivenko, who leads a rights group that provides legal assistance to Russian soldiers, that violence, coupled with the lack of independent oversight, makes war crimes more possible. Russian soldiers are just as capable of cruelty to their Russian compatriots, he says, as they are against Ukrainians.

“It is the state of the Russian army, this impunity, aggression and internal violence, that is expressed in these conditions,” Krivenko said in a telephone interview. “If there were an uprising in Voronezh,” a city in western Russia, “and the army were called, the soldiers would behave exactly the same way.”

But crimes in Ukraine can also stem from the Kremlin's years of dehumanizing propaganda against Ukrainians, which soldiers consume in compulsory visits. Russian recruits, as revealed by a sample program available on the Russian Ministry of Defense website, must attend “informative television programs” from 9 to 9:40pm every day except Sundays. The message that they are fighting the “Nazis”, as their ancestors did in World War II, is now spreading through the army, Russian news reports show.

In a video distributed by the Ministry of Defense, a navy commander, Major Aleksei Shabulin, says that his grandfather “chased fascist scum through the forests” during and after World War II, referring to Ukrainian independence fighters who once collaborated with Germany Nazi.

“Now I am gloriously continuing this tradition; now my time has come,” says Major Shabulin. “I will not dishonor my great-grandfather and go to the end.”

That propaganda also prepared Russian soldiers not to expect much resistance to the invasion; after all, the Kremlin narrative said, people in Ukraine had been subjugated by the West and were waiting for the release of their Russian brothers. Krivenko, the soldiers' rights defender, said he had spoken directly to a Russian soldier who called his group's hotline and said that even when his unit was ordered to enter Ukraine from Belarus, it was not clear that the soldiers were about to enter a war zone.

“The attitude of military commanders towards the army is basically like cattle,” Krivenko said. Putin has said that only hired soldiers will fight in Ukraine, but his Ministry of Defense was forced to admit last month that the recruits, who were serving the one-year period in the army required for Russian men aged 18 to 27, had also been sent to the front.

The Ukrainians defended themselves, even though Putin called them part of “one nation” with the Russians in an essay published last year that the Ministry of Defense did mandatory reading for its soldiers. The fierce resistance of a people considered part of their own contributed to the feeling that Ukrainians were worse than a typical adversary on the battlefield, said Mark Galeotti, who studies Russian security issues.

“The fact that ordinary Ukrainians are now taking up arms against them, there is a feeling that these are not just enemies, they are traitors,” he said.

And treason, Putin said, “is the most serious crime possible.”

To some extent, the violence of the Russian army against civilians is a characteristic, not a mistake. In Syria, Russia targeted hospitals to crush the last pockets of resistance to President Bashar al-Assad, a “brutally pragmatic approach to war” that has “its own appalling logic,” Galeotti said. It was an echo of Russia's aerial destruction of Grozny in 1999 and 2000, and a prelude to the fierce siege of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol in the current invasion.

Point-blank killings of civilians and sexual violence by individual soldiers are a separate issue. In Bucha, civilians told The New York Times that the mood and behavior of Russian troops worsened as the war progressed, and that the first soldiers to arrive were relatively peaceful.

“There is a group of young people deprived of sleep with guns for whom, according to them, none of the rules apply,” Galeotti said.

Violence has prompted academics to reassess their understanding of the Russian army. In a military operation that seemed, at least at first, to be aimed at gaining Ukrainians' loyalty to Moscow, atrocities against civilians seem grotesquely counterproductive. Russia has already experienced that in Chechnya, where Russian violence against civilians fueled Chechen resistance.

“Every civilian killed meant a bullet for a Russian soldier,” said Kirill Shamiev, who studies relations between Russian civilians and military at the University of Central Europe in Vienna. “I thought they had learned some lessons.”

But Stanislav Gushchenko, a journalist who served as a psychologist in the Russian army in the early 2000s, said he was not surprised by reports of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. He recalled the daily violence in his unit and the banal mistreatment of Russian civilians, such as the time a group of soldiers with whom he was traveling on a long-distance train stole a roasted chicken that an elderly woman had brought in her car for their livelihood.

In a telephone interview from the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, Gushchenko marveled at the Russians who now express shock.

“I say, 'Guys, things were pretty much the same 20 years ago, '” he said. “You lived in your own closed world, in some kind of bubble, or as psychologists say, in a comfort zone, and you didn't want to realize this or you didn't really notice it.”

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