Putin's war

Everywhere where Russian troops retreated, there were masses of traces of robbery and plundering. Some soldiers send the stolen goods to their relatives back home.

What this reveals about the state of the army?

That they are greedy soul-less vipers jubilating in the opportunity to kill people who've no weapons and pose no threat..................then they can loot them of everything of value and ship it back to the other soul-less worshipers of Putin so they can all revel in the stolen stuff they brought back. Hooray for the thieves, the bastards.

DER SPIEGEL has learned that German intelligence intercepted radio traffic from the Russian military regarding the murder of civilians in Bucha. It appears that such atrocities were part of the plan.

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, has acquired gruesome new insights into the atrocities committed by Russian military forces in the town of Bucha near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. DER SPIEGEL has learned that the BND intercepted Russian military radio traffic in which the murder of civilians in Bucha was discussed. Some of the intercepted radio traffic can apparently be directly linked to dead bodies that have been photographed in Bucha.

Following the withdrawal of the Russian military from the town over the weekend, a mass grave was discovered as well as the bodies of several dozen dead civilians left lying on the streets. The hands of some of the victims had been tied, while other bodies showed signs of torture. Numerous women and children are also reportedly among the victims.

The Russian government has vehemently denied that Russian forces are responsible for these war crimes. Several – completely unsubstantiated – claims have been made that the alleged war crimes have been staged by Ukraine. Those claims, however, are contradicted by the statements of numerous witnesses interviewed by reporters from DER SPIEGEL and other news outlets in the town of Bucha.

The intercepted comments now appear to completely refute Russia’s denials. DER SPIEGEL has learned that the BND briefed parliamentarians on Wednesday about its findings. Some of the intercepted traffic apparently matches the locations of bodies found along the main road through town. In one of them, a soldier apparently told another that they had just shot a person on a bicycle. That corresponds to the photo of the dead body lying next to a bicycle that has been shared around the world. In another intercepted conversation, a man apparently said: First you interrogate soldiers, then you shoot them.

Part of the Plan?
The BND material also apparently provides evidence that members of the Russian mercenary unit called the Wagner Group played a leading role in the atrocities. The group is known to have perpetrated similar atrocities in Syria.

Eyewitnesses recently reported that the occupying force in Bucha was initially made up of "young soldiers." Once they were replaced by other units, the witnesses said, the attacks on civilians grew more frequent. Some eyewitnesses have said that Chechen units were in the town. The accounts raise the question as to whether this progression was part of the occupation plan.

The radio traffic intercepted by the BND makes it seem as though the atrocities perpetrated on civilians in Bucha were neither random acts nor the product of individual soldiers who got out of hand. Rather, say sources familiar with the audio, the material suggests that the troops spoke of the atrocities as though they were simply discussing their everyday lives.

That, say sources familiar with the audio, indicates that the murder of civilians has become a standard element of Russian military activity, potentially even part of a broader strategy. The intention is that of spreading fear among the civilian population and thus reducing the will to resist.

DER SPIEGEL has learned that more intercepted radio traffic is currently being analyzed, though it is apparently difficult to precisely localize some of the audio. Some of the recordings apparently indicate that incidents such as those in Bucha have also taken place elsewhere. There are reportedly indications of potential atrocities in the area surrounding Mariupol, the large city in southern Ukraine that has been besieged by the Russian military.

What fact are you disputing?

And so the pattern was set for the next decade: NATO expanded, first into the former East Germany, then beyond; Gorbachev—and later Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Federation after the USSR’s implosion in 1991—put up a fuss; the US, Germany, and the IMF sent Moscow billions of dollars to quell his protests (though much of the money disappeared, as the elites controlling Russia’s government shifted it to foreign bank accounts). When President Clinton told Yeltsin that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—the three Baltic states that had once been Soviet republics—would join NATO at some point, Yeltsin begged him not to pile on such deep humiliation. Clinton held out the bribe of Russian membership in several Western institutions, including the prestigious Group of Seven, consisting of the most powerful industrial democracies. Yeltsin caved; he had no alternative. (Russia was expelled from the G-8, turning it back into the G-7, in 2014, as punishment for annexing Crimea.)

All this said, it is crucial to note that the campaign to expand NATO was not simply a power play by the West’s cold war victors. The most excited advocates of enlargement were the leaders (and to a great degree the populations) of the Central and Eastern European states, who were eager to throw off the Kremlin’s yoke and join the West. To some, this was a matter of principle; to others, it posed an irresistible opportunity to get on the winning side. Either way, neutrality was not an attractive option. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera once defined a small country as “one which knew it could disappear at any moment,” and if the leaders of these newly independent states hadn’t read Kundera, they’d witnessed enough modern history firsthand to draw the same lesson.