Ukraine: Putin fighting a losing battle as he condemns Russian army to ‘perish senselessly’

In the time it takes you to read this article, two more Russian soldiers will have been killed or wounded in Ukraine, based on the Pentagon’s latest estimate of the rate of casualties from December to April.

The assessment of 20,000 killed and 80,000 wounded in those months represents an acceleration in the rate of carnage among the Russian forces, roughly double the pace of the war’s first nine months.

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

Vladimir Putin’s henchman, commander of the Wagner Group of mercenaries Yevgeny Prigozhin, on Friday said that without sufficient ammunition his troops were “doomed to perish senselessly”. With these four words, Prigozhin has written the draft epitaph for Russia’s army.

The two defining features of Putin’s invasion are its savagery and its senselessness. The arrest warrant that the International Criminal Court issued against Putin charges him with the war crime of seizing Ukrainian children and deporting them to Russia on a mass scale: “There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility” for stealing Ukraine’s children, said the court. Ukraine’s authorities say that the Russians have taken at least 20,000 of their children.

Why? “Beyond intimidating parents, Moscow authorities have consistently operated for centuries from the belief that children can be ‘re-educated’ to forget their families, deny their communities, and forsake their identity for ideological loyalty to the state,” write a pair of scholars, American expert on conflict management Kristina Hook and Ukrainian history lecturer Oleksandra Gaidai.

Moscow wants to obliterate Ukraine’s next generations and replenish its own. Writing for cnn.com, the scholars recount that a rescued teenager said his group of captive children were forced to acknowledge a statue with the inscription “Putin is king” to earn food. “Other forms of physical and sexual abuse add terrible urgency to rescuing each child,” they add.

The head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, recorded a video in which he mocked Putin and his generals.Credit: AP

And Putin’s war fighting is aimed squarely at murdering civilians. His forces systematically and consistently target ordinary Ukrainians. Last Tuesday, for instance, Russia carried out 19 missile strikes, according to Kyiv. They hit residential buildings, schools, hospitals and kindergartens.

This is reported weekly and matter-of-factly in the media, as if it were normal. In fact, it is a war crime of the worst order, committed as an act of policy. Beyond demoralising Ukraine’s people, its aim appears to be wiping them from the earth. Genocide.