On September 4, Russia’s top state media editor Margarita Simonyan said on TV that the Ukraine war could not end until that “lesser human” nation is “crushed to the end.”
Ukrainian children should be given to good Russian families, she said, so they could be raised as “human beings.”
Simonyan stated:
“Thank God we are different … We do not allow ourselves to carpet bomb Ukrainian cities. Why? Because we couldn’t? We could have, easily. I am proud that we don’t allow ourselves that.”
That is misleading. In fact, Russia has been widely accused of indiscriminate bombing, or deliberately hitting civilian targets.
To cite the most recent example, the country’s second-biggest heat and power plant in Kharkiv on September 12, apparently in retaliation after Ukrainian forces recaptured the key city in a sweeping offensive operation.
Indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets has arguably been a signature Russian tactic, one that Moscow used in its war on Chechnya in 1990s and early 2000s and the Syrian civil war. A United Nations team accused the Russian air force of war crimes in Syria.
The dates back to the Second World War practice of “saturation bombing,” or dropping massive quantities of ordnance across a wide area to cause overwhelming devastation and terror.
Whether the term fits Russia’s combination of in Ukraine is debatable. But there’s no disputing that , , killing and wounding thousands of noncombatants.
“Russian bombers just carpet-bombed Mariupol,” on April 15.
Russian jets dropped unguided bombs on the besieged city, where more than 160,000 civilians were trapped in dire conditions, Forbes said. A single bomb attack on a Mariupol theater being used a shelter is believed to have.
The U.K.’s that satellite images showed “devastated residential building, blasted park lands and smoldering grocery stores.” The photos showed blocks-long swaths of burned-out buildings and homes.
The International Red Cross called .” claimed that had destroyed 95% of the city, still under Russian control, and estimated that about 22,000 civilians were killed.
The 90% of Mariupol’s residential buildings were destroyed or damaged and that it had confirmed 1,348 civilian deaths, a toll likely to be thousands short of the actual one.
Russian bombs obliterated the southern town of to such a degree that . showed troops rounding up prisoners amid battered homes, shredded trees and debris from explosions that looked like the aftermath of a tornado.
In April, , where more than 4,000 civilians were awaiting evacuation to safety. More than 50 people were killed and nearly 100 injured in that attack.
The governor of Ukraine’s Donetsk province, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said in April that Russia had used cluster bombs “to kill as many civilians as possible and to sow panic and fear,” .
The Cluster Munition Coalition, a civil society watchdog group and Human Rights Watch have accused both Russia and Ukraine of using , which release scores of bomblets across a wide area, . (Both Ukraine and Russia deny using cluster bombs.)
Western warfare experts compare Russia’s bombing of Ukraine with .
Here’s how The National Interest described the battle for the Chechen capital Grozny in 1994:
Analysts at the U.S. think-tank . said in a March 28 commentary that Russia did the same in Aleppo in 2015 on behalf of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad: