As of yesterday, the conservative estimate of innocent non-combatant civilians killed by Russians in Ukrainian cities like Mariupol, Bucha, and others range from 5,000 to several times that number. Many with their hands bound behind their backs, shot in the head execution-style. Some were left in the streets (we have satellite images of that) and many were shoveled into mass graves.
These were not “guerillas” or “partisan fighters” – these were old men, women, and children too frail, and sick, and helpless to evacuate to Poland, or some other safe location. The Russian army has intentionally laid landmines on agreed upon “safe evacuation routes” and the Russian air force has bombed convoys traveling there. Bombs have also been dropped on Ukrainian buildings clearly labeled “Children” in the hopes of avoiding destruction.
Maybe you’re watching this unfold on the news. Maybe – like many Americans – you’re sick of seeing it all, and you’ve stopped watching, but that doesn’t stop the carnage.
But rumors – and I emphasize that at this point that these are rumors – are now rapidly spreading that many more have been cremated to cover up this alleged atrocity of the murder of innocent civilians.
Back in February Ben Wallace the Secretary of State for Defense for the United Kingdom stated that the Russian military had brought mobile crematorium units forward with them from Russia to avoid sending body bags back home, and thereby conceal the number of casualties they were sustaining in the conflict.
That’s creepy and sick right there.
Now, these same units are rumored to have been pressed into service to cover these war crimes – these massacres of innocent civilians… women and even children.
I emphasize that these are rumors, that nothing has yet been confirmed. But these mobile crematorium units do exist, they are in the inventory of the Russian army.
I don’t know which is more horrible; the fact that the Russians would do such a thing, or the fact that they have special equipment in their inventory to help them do it, soldiers trained in their use and tactics that support them.
Here’s a video of one of these units.
Snopes.com (and I trust Snopes like, not at all, for most of their ‘reporting’) rates this story as “unproven”. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.
Whether the alleged use of Russian mobile crematorium units is ever corroborated or not, the fact is – THE FACT IS – that thousands of innocent Ukrainian civilians have been rounded up and murdered by the Russian army, on the orders of Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia.
The question is what will the world do about it? What will America do about it? What should we do about it?
What did we do about Putin’s illegal seizure of Crimea in 2014, his massacre of innocents in Aleppo, Syria in 2012, or his seizure of Georgia in 2008?
Well, we did what we’re doing now, of course. We hid behind the fact that Russia was a nuclear power, that there were no clear American interests at stake, and that we were not bound by any treaty.
I think this quote from John Stuart Mills, a 19th century English economist and philosopher sums it up quite nicely…
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”