Rapes, bombs on clinics and supermarkets: When the West thinks it can’t get any crueler, Vladimir Putin’s soldiers deliver one more twist – cutting off Ukrainian men’s testicles alive. The Russian regime is fueling the contempt for humanity. How can all this be explained?
29 July 2022 – Small but authentic horror videos are emerging more and more frequently in Ukraine these days and weeks. Sometimes you see a person’s severed head impaled on a fence. Sometimes you look at the arm stumps of a man who has just had both hands cut off. In between, soldiers of the Russian army show themselves grinning. They proudly pose in front of their digital audience with homemade creepy trophies.
Sequences of this kind are eagerly passed back and forth on Russian Telegram channels. Western social networks, on the other hand, immediately pull them from circulation and block the accounts involved.
A horrific video has emerged that shows a Russian soldier castrating a Ukrainian prisoner. Twitter deleted the video – sparking a debate of its own kind. Liberal Ukrainian MP Inna Sovsun, for example, protested: “Twitter decided it was too cruel. But these are exactly the things that happen. Deleting the video won’t change that.”
In fact, the brutality of the Russians in their actions in Ukraine has reached a level that the mainstream media in the West are no longer allowed to portray in concrete terms, if only to protect minors: it would be all too disturbing, whether on Twitter or in the daily news.
Yana Stepanenko, 11, looks at her phone as she lies in bed at a public hospital in Lviv, Ukraine on Thursday, 12 May 2022. Yana and her mother Natasha, 43, were injured 8 April during shelling at the train station of the eastern city of Kramatorsk where they travelled with Yana’s twin brother Yaroslav from their village near the front line. Around 1,000 has just gathered there, almost all women nd children. They were planning to catch an evacuation train heading west and, they hoped, to safety. Yana lost both legs, and her mother also had to have a leg amputated. There were 57 dead. Russia had used cluster munitions, which are outlawed worldwide and increase fragmentation, for the attack.
These hardly bearable images are created in Ukraine almost every day, not only sporadically in some gloomy torture chambers of the Russians. They emerge around the clock, up and down the country, in broad daylight, even in minor incidents that don’t make it into Western news.
Today, in Mykolaiv, for example, the Russians bombed a residential area. In order to kill and maim as many people as possible, they waited until streets and squares filled up. The carnage began at 9:45 a.m. and knocked a dozen people off their feet at a bus stop alone, where bread was being sold. Five were killed instantly, and seven others were rushed to nearby hospitals, some with bones sticking out of their wounds, with uncertain chances of survival.
And, just as before in Syria, the Russians are resorting to a murderous method called “double tap” in Ukraine. In a first wave of attacks, for example, a shopping center is set ablaze. A second bombing then follows at a certain distance in order to kill the “first responders” as well: paramedics, emergency doctors, firefighters, police officers, volunteers. CNN journalist Clarissa Ward documented this pattern of the Russians as early as April 2022 in a report from Kharkiv. And on July 20, 2022, human rights activists from the exiled Syria Justice and Accountability Center presented the world’s most detailed study to date of Russia’s “double tap” attacks on humanitarian aid workers in Syria. Titled “When the planes return”. 58 inhumane attacks of this kind are documented in detail.
Analysts at NATO note with a shudder that the Russian activities can hardly be explained if one applies classical military standards. For the Russian army is acting more and more openly along the lines of a terrorist gang. Admitting the idea of sheer terror as a war target takes some effort, but it can be helpful. Those who accept the logic of terror suddenly find explanations even for the previously inexplicable, from the contradictory back and forth of Russian troops on the battlefield to the bombing of a Ukrainian maternity clinic on 9 March 2022.
Let’s talk about the new video showing the castration of the Ukraine soldier. But first just a few notes on OSINT.
As I noted when this war began, OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) was going to be key to following and understanding this war because disinformation would run rampant. OSINT is derived from data and information that is available to the general public. It’s not limited to what can be found using Google, although the so-called “surface web” is an important component. Most of the tools and techniques used to conduct open source intelligence initiatives are designed to help security professionals (or even threat actors) focus their efforts on specific areas of interest.
Of course, if you are an eDiscovery vendor reading this post or if you do digital investigations of any kind you know all this stuff because you use it all the time. OSINT has enabled many forensic breakthroughs in recent years and Bellingcat has made the most full use of it over any organisation I know. The internet remains an astonishing resource for helping redress the power imbalances between the rulers and the ruled. History is no longer just written by the winners, but filmed by the losers on their smartphones. To me, Bellingcat stands at the nexus of journalism, activism, computer science, criminal investigation and academic research.
The footage of the castration was originally posted on pro-Russian Telegram channels, and then re-distributed on Reddit, Julia, TikTok, Youtube, etc. although many social media platforms are trying to remove it. It is frightening. I will not repost it.
And so I consulted my contact at Bellingcat. He confirmed what Bellingcat officially issued earlier today: the video appears to be authentic and a Russian soldier wearing a distinctive black hat and wristband in the video is the same man who appeared in a previous clip aired by the Russian broadcaster RT, wearing the same distinctive black hat and wristband. The Russian soldier is seen approaching another figure who has his hands bound and is lying face down with the back of his trousers cut away. That prisoner is wearing blue and yellow patches identifying him as Ukrainian. The Russian soldier is wearing blue surgical gloves, holding a green-handled box cutter knife and reaches down to mutilate the prisoner as other soldiers abuse the prisoner.
There were reports the soldier was later executed but medical analysts at Bellingcat said absent immediate medical treatment, the Ukrainian soldier likely died from blood loss.
Bellingcat said that while much is unknown about the provenance and date that the footage was recorded, and where, that Russian soldier in the video was previously filmed in the vicinity of the Azot chemical works in Sievierodonetsk in eastern Ukraine and that he was serving with a Chechen formation known as the Akhat battalion.
Further, dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed in an attack on a prison building in Russian-occupied Donetsk that both sides in the war have blamed on each other. According to reports, the Ukrainian troops who died were among those taken prisoner after the fierce fighting for the Azovstal steel mill complex in the port of city of Mariupol. The Azov regiment and other Ukrainian units defended the steel mill for nearly three months, clinging to its underground maze of tunnels. They surrendered in May under relentless Russian attacks from the ground, sea and air. Scores of Ukrainian soldiers were taken to prisons in Russian-controlled areas such as Donetsk, an area in eastern Ukraine run by Russian-backed separatist authorities.
Bellingcat noted that Donetsk was close to the frontline and establishing responsibility is likely to be “highly challenging” without independent access to the site – but not impossible. Maria Avdeeva, another OSINT source, said she believes the Ukrainian PoWs were killed in an attempt to destroy evidence of Russian war crimes. A stream of verified information has revealed the filtration camp was used to torture and execute Ukrainian PoWs. And Bellingcat did say the calcination is consistent with the presence of explosive and combustible materials inside a building, so they assumed this was also an ammo depot.
And … a spokeswoman for the Donetsk People’s Republic told Russian military TV (all Russian TV is automatically recorded by multiple video companies) that none of the Russian guards were killed or injured. A happy coincidence.
BUT AS I WATCHED THAT VIDEO I FELT AS MY UKRAINIAN FRIEND SERGEI OSTAPENKO FELT: “IT WAS ME WHO WAS SHOT DEAD TODAY”.
As I watched the horrific footage of a Ukrainian prisoner of war gagged by Russian savages who then cut off his genitals with a box cutter knife, who then dragged him on a street and shot him in the head, I was shot dead, too. It was my leg that was ripped off by a massive cruise missile blast in downtown Vinnitca not long ago, when a mother and her daughter got slaughtered. And it was me who got smashed by concrete slabs and who died in suffocation when an apartment collapsed from a direct bomb hit in Kharkiv, just like the one a few days ago.
It is me. It is us, each one of us, who die every day, seeing these mad, barbaric tribes from the swamps of Moskvia. The purpose of terror is to scare, to destroy the willingness of Ukraine to fight, for the West to fight.
All people will react strongly to this heinous crime. But in my view it’s no different than the 1000’s of brutal rapes already committed.
Or the hundreds of torture chambers, with blood and bullet holes in the walls.
Or the bound bodies of executed men and women.
Or the targeted strikes on now dozens of schools and hospitals.
Or the found and yet undiscovered mass graves.
Or the small children who walked on playgrounds and mistakenly detonated illegal cluster munitions.
Or the tanks firing directly into buildings at point blank range
Or the use of thermobaric weapons
Or the launch of Kalibre missiles directly into cities with no strategic value.
All are war crimes. Some are just crimes. Committed by craven and unstable people.
When this war started I wrote a short piece on the millions of people in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iraq, Palestine, Somalia, and Syria and elsewhere who have been displaced and left homeless – and tortured, murdered, and raped.
But what Ukraine is experiencing is exponentially worse. It’s Putin, his ministers, his military leaders. They’ve criminally messaged their Russian “superiority,” just like Hitler did. As I have chronicled, the mass rape, execution and mutilation of women, the general depravity and dehuminization of civilians in general, all instrumental violence directed at achieving a specific goal: the destruction of the Ukraine people, Ukraine culture, Ukraine civilisation.
And Russia has not changed or begun a new era of terror. Russia uses a century old playbook of shock, awe and barbarity. As the world evolved with science, education, technology, civility – Russia retreated to its Neanderthal past.
Ukraine must win this fight, as global sanity relies on it. We – the west and others – must unconditionally continue to support them. Militarily, diplomatically, economically, informationally. Our future relies on us doing so.
For Vladimir Putin, the focus is not on this or that military objective, but on the general will to destroy the Ukrainian people. The exact course of events is not so important to him; what is decisive is that in the end the Ukrainians either disappear from Ukraine – or die.
There is no question of collateral damage as in the case of other wars and other powers. It is true that the Russians repeatedly attack military targets in Ukraine. According to a report in the Kyiv Independent, however, the approximately 300 Russian attacks on military targets in Ukraine to date have been offset by no less than 17,300 Russian attacks on civilian targets. In many places, 50 percent of all residential buildings have been destroyed. If one takes Putin’s will to destroy as a yardstick, his claim, often ridiculed in the West, that everything is going according to plan no longer seems completely absurd.
Through cruelty to happiness?
Where does this desire for cruelty come from? Can everything always be traced back to Putin – or are broader, deeper sociocultural forces at work in Russia at this point? Well, it goes way back. A few days ago I linked to a piece by Peter Pomerantsev which is a magnificent piece of historical analysis.
And earlier this week Russian writer Viktor Yerofeyev, who fled to Germany, wrote in an essay these days that Putin had “cracked the secret of the people’s happiness.” Putin has understood that neither comfort, nor standard of living, nor friendship with the West come first for the Russian people. The Russian people have different standards for happiness, he said. “Russian happiness – it means domination,” Yerofeyev writes. “Russian happiness is the violation of every norm.”
Yerofeyev’s theses are provocative. But what is currently happening in Ukraine does not contradict them.