Ukraine update: 'This is an evil that has no limits'

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On Thursday evening, Ukrainian officials announced that, in anticipation of major battle in the area, they were evacuating a broad swatch of eastern Ukraine. Residents in a number of cities and towns were urged to show up at bus stops and train stations. From there, they would be taken out of the conflict zone and delivered to Kyiv or other locations where they would be safe. 

On Friday morning, Russia bombed the train stations in at least four locations. At least 35 people, gathered with a handful of their belongings, seeking to escape the invasion, were killed on the station platform at Kramatorsk. How many have died in other locations is still unknown.

Informed of this latest tragedy, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy replied in a way that captured the whole nature of the last 43 days of this invasion: “Lacking the strength and courage to stand up to us on the battlefield,” said Zelenskyy, “they are cynically destroying the civilian population. This is an evil that has no limits.”

It was Ian Fleming’s arch-villain Auric Goldfinger who uttered one of the most memorable lines in fiction, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” When it comes to missiles and bombs directed at civilian targets, Russia is far past those bounds. What they’re doing is something that goes beyond even the terrible label of war crime. It is war crimes as a strategy. It blows past depraved indifference into the realm of cold and calculated malevolence. 

While the bombing of the maternity hospital in Mariupol might have been the most visible instance, there are multiple towns and cities where Russia has bombed or shelled every hospital and medical facility. They’ve fired missiles directly into schools and kindergartens. They’ve targeted  water plants and electrical supplies. As Russia has done in so many places before, they relentlessly targeted civilian homes. Perhaps most odious of all, they deliberately sought out locations marked as shelters, those places where frightened people huddled together when the air raid sirens sounded, and struck those locations with bombs and missiles.

Terrible things happened in World War II, where governments—including, and perhaps even especially, the United States—resorted to widescale bombing of cities in an effort to reduce an enemy’s ability to continue the war. Millions of dumb munitions were dropped in places like Dresden in the hopes that some would find their targets, and the knowledge that many would end human lives. This isn’t World War II, and that’s not what this is about. 

This is directed artillery fire and precision-guided munitions that have been deliberately targeted to cause the most pain, the most death, the most ongoing harm, to civilians. It’s a strategy to deprive people of their homes, of their health, and where if fails to take away their lives, of anything that might make those lives tolerable. What makes it far more terrible is that if Russian forces were actually seeking to limit their strikes to military targets, and to hit civilian areas only when they were intermingled with military equipment, they could. The Russian military didn’t just choose not to do that, they chose to do the opposite. They chose to preferentially attack civilians and civilian infrastructure.

It is a malignant strategy. A despicable strategy. One for which sufficiently vile adjectives do not exist. It’s little wonder Russian soldiers are engaged in horrendous crimes as individuals when their leadership is showing them that causing pain and suffering is the goal.

Yes, it’s war. Terrible things happen in war. Etc. Etc. That doesn’t make Russia’s actions any more tolerable or acceptable. What is clear is that any end to this invasion that doesn’t see the Russian military and civilian leadership, as a whole and as individuals, answering for these crimes, is unacceptable.