New Details of Russian War Crimes in Ukraine Are Stomach-Turning – Opinion

As RedState reported, the uncovering of war crimes in Bucha has become another challenging detail of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. People were found shot in the back of the head, hands bound behind their backs shortly after Vladimir Putin’s forces vacated the region.

New details about mass graves containing victims of torture and rape are now turning stomachs, reminding us of the Russian military’s past.

The New York Post has this information:

A body belonging to a Ukrainian 23-year old woman was discovered in Bucha among many other corpses. It had been found after she was tortured and shot in her head.

The Telegraph reported Wednesday that Karina Yershova lost her nails during an apparent struggle for her life. She was found dead in a Kyiv suburb garden.

“She was shot at point-blank range. Almost half of her head was missing,” Andrii, the tragic woman’s stepfather, told the news outlet

Photos of the mass cemetery in question were published shortly after the news about the executions was made public nearly two weeks earlier. I don’t feel there’s any need to post them again in this article, but suffice it to say, they aren’t just speculation based on anonymous sourcing.

This raises the stakes in regard to Russia’s atrocities. I was originally hesitant to use the term genocide, something former President Donald Trump did on Wednesday, but I think it’s fair to describe this as such. Systematically eliminating people under the guise of “denazification” in Ukraine and then dumping them in mass graves is genocide, even if on a local scale. We’ll have to see if these kinds of acts are further uncovered once Russia is forced to retreat from other parts of the country.

And while some have taken a contrarian view, asserting this was actually Ukraine setting up a false-flag operation, there’s no evidence of that. It is farcical to think that not a single person in Bucha would step forward and say “This wasn’t the Russians” and that every eyewitness is part of some grand conspiracy. Satellite photos also show that the graves and bodies were present in the city while Russia was occupying it.

It is hard to believe that anyone would think the Russians could do such things. The Russians know this. This was what they did in World War II. They did this throughout their escapades during the Cold War, and they did this more recently in Syria, though it was largely ignored (and I’m anti-interventionist when it comes to Syria because I think it just prolongs the killing and suffering, but that also applies to Russian meddling there). It is still the same Russian disposition as it was 75 year ago: complete disregard for human rights, and an incredibly brutal execution of war.

The Democrat Party was once a big fan of Soviets, then Russians, but after the Fall of the Iron Curtain the party has changed the script and uses Russia to target the right. But there’s no reason to even grant them their premise. I’m not going to defend Putin just because Biden doesn’t like them. Republicans were calling out the Russians back when it wasn’t cool (i.e. in 2012) to do so. It is the Democrats who are late to the party because they were too busy doing “Russian resets” and other absurdities.