Far from restoring Russia to greatness, Putin has made it synonymous with war crimes

Editorial: Russia has used cluster bombs, attacked schools, hospitals, blocks of flats, food depots, turned off water supplies and cut electricity. Civilians are not collateral damage in this war, but targets

(Dave Brown)

Vladimir Putin, pushing 70 years of age, sees himself in traditionally macho terms, to the point of vanity. He poses topless atop virile white stallions, has discreet work done to preserve his facial features, and openly disdains effete oligarchs who cannot subsist without oysters, foie gras and “gender freedoms”.

For such a hard man who goes on rants about “scum traitors” and is dismissive about his critics as “midges” who must be spat out, he seems unduly bothered about being called a “war criminal” by Joe Biden. The label is “unforgiving” and “unacceptable” to the Kremlin, in the way that bombing a maternity hospital, presumably, is not.

The world does not need to look very hard for the sad evidence of Russian war crimes. Russia has used cluster bombs, attacked schools, hospitals, blocks of flats, food depots, turned off water supplies and cut electricity. Thermobaric bombs literally take the breath out of the lungs of their victims. Civilians are not collateral damage in this war, but targets.

The Ukrainians claim that civilians queuing for bread are shot with their hands in the air in surrender, and there seems no reason to doubt it. The aim of the Russians is, seemingly, not to defeat Ukraine, but to destroy it – its people, its culture and physical infrastructure.

The town of Mariupol, for example, was a pleasant seaside resort before the invasion – a sort of Ukrainian Brighton. Now, it is being systemically razed by Russian bombardment, and its people starved into submission. They are not even allowed to escape through humanitarian corridors without harassment. The staff and patients at the hospital are now hostages.

The theatre, full of sheltering civilians – including children –was attacked with casualties as yet uncounted, but probably running into hundreds; despite the occupants painting the word “children” in Russian on the ground outside. The aim is to demoralise the population, and spark disorder and dissent through the destruction of life and property. Russia is trying to terrify them into surrender, but the effect is to strengthen their fear of the Russians and their resolve to resist.

Soon, Mariupol will join other places virtually wiped off the face of the earth in war – including Aleppo and Grozny (where Russia or its proxies also deployed its barbaric methods of war), Hue, Stalingrad, Dresden, Warsaw, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Ypres. Perhaps, like Coventry Cathedral, the village of Oradour-sir-Glane in France, Lidice in the Czech Republic and Belchite in Spain, parts of Mariupol will be preserved as a memorial to atrocities.

The invasion itself, the war of aggression obviously ordered by President Putin himself, was the original, ultimate war crime from which all the subsequent suffering flowed – and has taken the lives of Ukrainians, Russians and others alike.

The American intelligence agencies put the number of Russian military deaths at 7,000, while the Ukrainians put the figure closer to double that, including no less than four generals. The Russians say they have lost 498 service personnel, which feels improbably low.

But it is the civilian population of Ukraine who have suffered most grievously, with a likely death toll eventually running to tens of thousands, many more injured and even more left homeless and in mourning for friends and family. Some 1 million children are now refugees in foreign lands, and millions more, mostly women, trying to find shelter and safety – a fracturing of virtually every family in Ukraine. If the Russian people realised that these are not neo-Nazi renegades but their kith and kin, the war would be ended in a day (and Putin with it).

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

Even if Vladimir Putin escapes a trial for war crimes – and his people don’t overthrow him when they realise the facts about what has been happening – he has left Russia far less secure after this “special military expedition”.

Ukraine cannot be occupied, pacified or turned into a docile client state. His armed forces have been shown up as badly organised and poorly equipped. He has managed to lose his remaining fans on the authoritarian populist hard right in the west. He has appalled even the Chinese. He has united the United Nations, the European Union and Nato.

He has pushed Germany into ditching its pacifism and boosting its defence budget by €100bn. He has crashed the rouble and deprived his industries of markets and investment. His people will have to go without the joys of western life they’ve grown accustomed to. He has turned an emerging economy into a pariah.

Far from restoring Russia to greatness, he has made it synonymous with war crimes. Russia’s great misfortune is that Putin is as vicious as Joseph Stalin – but as effective as Boris Yeltsin.