I didn’t say any of that. I pointed out that this particular blog source isn’t providing any tangible evidence and should be treated with skepticism.
I deliberately don’t follow much Ukrainian war news, I find the coverage from a western perspective distasteful so I went and googled around a bit.
This is a better evidenced and written article. Like I said I’m not a Russia fan and approaching western reporting with skepticism is generally a better approach in my opinion.
I think varying degrees of torture probably occur with all wars, by all sides. War is distasteful and terrible. (International) crimes are surely committed.
I agree that the article in question is weak. I know there’s already evidence that Russia has committed war crimes. Probably Ukraine, too. War sucks.
That’s generally my take, I’m not interested in breathless horse race reporting from CNN. I find it very suspicious that in my googling about torture in Ukraine, I found only one article mentioning atrocities from the Ukrainian side. I probably believe the Russians are being more brutal especially given the limited reporting I’ve seen about penal battalions. But given all the Nazi patches I’ve seen on Ukrainians, I doubt the war has been clean. From my understanding having never lived in a war zone, wars are never clean.
I don’t like this war reporting portraying Russians in a dehumanizing way. I think that’s dangerous narrative building. I don’t trust western reporting to not toe NATO’s line. So when I say I’m skeptical of articles, I try to take what information presented without the narrative attached. In this example I found not much actual information presented but a strong narrative of an invasive oppressive army brutalizing the civilian population showing no empathy and a penchant for war crimes. That might be true but the evidence presented for such a strong narrative is a picture of an ill maintained room and a police report.
We’re caught in the middle of a third world war, with many similarities to the first one: namely, inter-imperialist/inter-capitalist. Saying something bad about “your team” (the one you’re supposed to praise as supreme and glorious with a clear display of patriotism) is seen as traitor behavior worthy of prison. The US and UK would dehumanize Germans back during WWI, and send labor activists to jail over claims of German interference. You’re right to avoid the trap of dehumanizing “the other” for the sake of trying to pick the lesser of two evils. Never pick sides in an inter-imperialist conflict. At best you get an FDR to avert revolution, at worst you get a bunch of Mussolinis walking around.
That’s fair, and Iappreciate your response. However, at this point most reasonable people understand how vicious Russian occupiers are. Most people still making arguments about the veracity of their crimes are not arguing in good faith.
