Episode 27: Tactical Brutality

Max Fisher on the Russian Way of War

The Russian military withdrew from Bucha at the end of March, a suburb of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. Soon after, photos and news stories revealed Russian atrocities, including the apparent intentional killing of civilians. This is sadly characteristic of the Russian way of war in other conflicts beyond Ukraine. Some, including President Biden, have accused Russia of committing genocide in Ukraine. But even if Putin’s military is guilty of acts of genocide and war crimes, will it actually be held accountable?

In this episode of None Of The Above, the Eurasia Group Foundation's Mark Hannah looks back at history with New York Times columnist Max Fisher to understand the roots of the Russian military’s targeting of civilians and past efforts to bring war criminals to justice. Though prosecuting those in power is difficult, Max argues justice might come in other forms.

Max Fisher is an international reporter and columnist for The New York Times. Along with journalist Amanda Taub, he writes the column and newsletter, “The Interpreter.”

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

“Why Calls for War Crimes Justice Over Ukraine Face Long Odds” (Max Fisher, The New York Times, April 10, 2022)
“Russia’s Brutality in Ukraine Has Roots in Earlier Conflicts” (Max Fisher, The New York Times, March 18, 2022)

Archival:

Ukraine War: Mariupol theatre 'sheltering hundreds' bombed (Sky News, March 17, 2022)
Ukraine refuses to surrender Mariupol to Russian forces (CBS News, April 17, 2022
Biden says Putin should be tried for war crimes (CBS Evening News, April 4, 2022)
Law expert predicts when Putin will be indicted for war crimes (CNN, March 11, 2022)
Pol Pot - The Khmer Rouge & the Killing Fields Documentary (The People Profiles, October 8, 2021)
Georgia-Russia War Probe: ICC prosecutor to investigate Russia, Georgia over 2008 conflict (UKRAINE TODAY, October 17, 2015)

Transcript:

MAX FISHER: They've really internalized these lessons of: “Atrocities are the way to go, and that's what will really keep us acting as a great power.” And now they’re repeating it in Ukraine, where it is not working for them at all militarily. But that is why they arrived at this strategy—that seems both barbaric and completely irrational from the outside—is seeing it as a necessity for them.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. Russia continued bombing cities throughout Ukraine over the weekend and into Monday as it prepares an offensive in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian governor of Mariupol said that his city had been—quote unquote—“wiped off the face of the earth.”

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: Russia's invasion has devastated many Ukrainian cities, and despite efforts to evacuate civilians, Russia's tactics have left thousands of civilians dead or injured.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: President Biden referred to President Vladimir Putin's actions as genocide last week, and Biden has called for a trial to take place against him in the International Criminal Court. So, what is the plausibility of this? We’re wondering: can President Putin actually be held accountable for the atrocities in Ukraine?

FISHER: I mean, I think the one key thing to understand about international courts and international justice—especially around the rules of war, whether we're talking about the International Criminal Court or we're talking about a lot of these other criminal tribunals that have been set up by the U.N. over the years—is that in theory, these courts do see themselves as kind of supranational bodies that have jurisdiction over all governments. And I think that is what the people who work for them really believe, and they really strive for this idea of a global justice against war crimes and atrocities.

HANNAH: That's Max Fisher. Max is an international reporter and columnist for the New York Times. His newsletter is called The Interpreter, and it explores the ideas and context behind major world events.

FISHER: In practice, ever since they've been set up after World War II, there is exactly one kind of government that faces real prosecution or accountability from these courts, and that is a government that has been deposed—either deposed by war or deposed by a power struggle. And there's only one way the people in those governments go to face an international court for war crimes and other charges, and that is when the people who deposed them—whether it's an invading army, another side in a civil war, or a new government that threw them out—hand delivers them to either The Hague or the International Criminal Court or, again, whatever U.N. Tribunal is doing the investigating. It doesn't mean it's brute victor's justice. I mean, the court operates under real principles of impartiality and transparency in their real trials. But the way people get there is effectively an extension of victor's justice, which means if you are a government in power, you are effectively immune, as long as you're in power, to these sorts of charges.

HANNAH: So, what you're saying is that most members of sitting governments, no matter how strong the evidence is against them, won't ever be brought to justice, that only leaders who've been deposed or come out of power in other ways will get tried for the war crimes they've been accused of. So, although it's not necessarily brute justice, what are some examples of this sort of victor's justice?

FISHER: Oh man, there's so many. There's one I didn't mention in the article that I think is kind of fascinating—the Khmer Rouge. They were the government of Cambodia in the ‘70s—committed just a horrifying, horrifying atrocities—genocide—and then were deposed by an invasion from Vietnam. And there was no mystery that this had happened. What I think is the amazing thing about it is that these guys in the Khmer Rouge—they were out of power for many years because the Vietnamese invasion had deposed them. But they never faced international justice until the ‘90s, when a new successor government came in, and for their own reasons, they decided it would be in their interests to call up the U.N., basically, and say, “You know, we've got all these war criminals sitting around in our country. Would you like to come and set up an international tribunal to try them?”

Interlude featuring archival audio

FISHER: And that was finally when they faced justice. And there are a ton of examples like this.

Slobodan Milosevic oversaw a number of pretty horrible war crimes in Bosnia, and he only faced justice when he was overthrown in 2000 during what some people call a revolution. Some people just call it a coup or an overthrow. But whatever your position on the folks who removed him from power, again, called up the U.N. and said, “Would you like to have this guy so we can get him off of our soil? Try him at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia.”

And there are tons of these because it's almost exclusively the only way that it actually happens. It’s just Nuremberg over and over again, where the Nazis were absolutely guilty, and they faced a sincere and impartially executed justice. But they only did so because someone came in and deposed them first and then made it happen to them.

And other than that, Bashar al-Assad is not facing war crimes charges, and there's no mystery as to what he did.

HANNAH: Based on what we've seen play out throughout history, it seems that unless President Putin is defeated and is delivered to The Hague, he might not face the kind of accountability so many want to see. So, what's the point of having this conversation if the likelihood of a trial is so low, in fact? With this in mind—and the fact that the United States not only abstains from the International Criminal Court, but has actually worked in cases to undermine it in order to protect American citizens, it could be implicated—I asked Max if this call for accountability in the courts is more symbolic than an actual effective tool in prosecuting war crimes.

FISHER: It's definitely a big bummer, to just put it bluntly, to hear that Vladimir Putin is not facing war crimes charges and that the officers in his military who are ordering what, I agree, certainly look, in all appearances, like very clearly war crimes. But they're not facing charges. In this universe, unless there's a major change of power in Russia, or something crazy like that happens, it's just not going to come to pass. But you kind of said like, “Well, is this all just cathartic?” And that's actually not the worst thing. I was looking at the ICC’s investigation into alleged Russian war crimes in Georgia during the 2008 war—which the fact that that investigation is just now taking in 14 years after the war tells you something about how well these things work.

Interlude featuring archival audio

FISHER: They've issued—or have not even yet issued, but the court has requested—exactly three arrest warrants, which just happened a few weeks ago, and it’s for three Russian individuals in Russian-controlled South Ossetia in Georgia. None of them are going to face arrest, so it's easy to look at it and say, “Is this all bullshit? And is this all completely meaningless?” And there is a world in which it is, and there's a lot of Georgians who were pushed out of South Ossetia, who that is exactly the word they would use for this investigation. But at the same time, the ICC is part of this. They took testimony from, I think 6,000 people—might have even been more—who were pushed out of South Ossetia about their experiences: “What happened? Let's get it on record. Let's make it transparent.”

They set up a special fund that doesn't have a lot of money in it, but something like a little under a million euros, to provide medical and psychological assistance for families who are pushed out. But there's still something about just having an international body that comes out and says, “There were war crimes. Here's how we know. Here's the evidence. Here's who did it.” It doesn't do anything to roll back those war crimes. It's not retributive justice where the perpetrator is being punished, but the hope is that it provides a mixture of restorative justice where the victims, who—there's a school of thought that says those are the people we should actually be caring about—get some sort of recognition, maybe some sort of recompense for what happened to them.

Another model you hear discussed sometimes is there was an international investigation of the Dutch airliner that was shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2014, which I'm sure you remember. And again, this court doesn't have any actual power to send the people who did that to jail, but it's a way to hold up this evidence to the world to say, “It happened. Here's who did it.” And that is maybe a little half step towards a world where we have something that more actually resembles international justice. Maybe not. But that's the reason the people who do it, do it. I think they're not unaware of these limitations and of how the way the world actually works.

HANNAH: I also asked Max about the roots of Russia's military tactics. Given that Russia has been accused of committing war crimes before in places like Georgia and even previously in Ukraine. Have we seen Russia act this way before, targeting and bombing civilian populations?

FISHER: I was really surprised to learn all of this when I started looking into it a couple of weeks ago. I expected the answer to be a kind of general, maybe sense of lawlessness. There's not a sense that the international rules apply to us, or some kind of fuzzy cultural explanation for it. So, I was really surprised that there turns out to be an actually very clear step by step doctrinal evolution towards a very deliberate and conscious strategy of committing deliberate, willful, horrifying atrocities against civilian populations. And it emerges out of three very specific things, mostly in the ‘90s.

The first one is the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russian military leaders dealing very openly in these kind of doctrinal debates that you can go back and read, with: “We've lost fifty to sixty percent of our population, and therefore our military force, with the breakup of the Soviet Union.” But Moscow still believed it had to face up against NATO. So, what's their solution to that? And their answer is that in order to preserve their now very scarce manpower in any conflict—which, again, they presume is going to be with NATO—to rely overwhelmingly on artillery and airstrikes and then hold the forces back and obliterate whatever they're fighting against, or whoever they're fighting against, and then send in their smaller number of troops to kind of mop up what the artillery and the airstrikes have done. So, that’s step number one.

And then the second was that Moscow faced this pair of really traumatizing losses in counterinsurgencies, first in Afghanistan at the end of the ‘80s, and the first Chechen War in the middle of the 1990s. And they face these really terrible losses in both of these conflicts that Moscow believed were incredibly destabilizing for Russia at home. There's a real school of thought in Moscow, still, that all of the losses they suffered fighting a counterinsurgency for a decade in Afghanistan contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And then facing the same in Chechnya five years later led to, in this view, the downfall of Boris Yeltsin and the weakening of his government because they couldn't hold onto their own territory in Chechnya. And so, that leads to this view that losing a counterinsurgency is completely intolerable and unbearable for the Russian military, and they have to surmount that by just terrorizing any enemy population into submission from afar rather than fighting them directly.

So, those are kind of the two setups, and all of this comes to fruition into the strategy we have since seen in Syria and are now seeing Ukraine and in the Second Chechen War, which starts in 1999. And very overtly, very openly, the Russian military goes in, and they announce that they thought their errors in the past were being too kind to civilians. And they're going to treat all civilians, first in Grozny and then generally, as just presumed enemy combatants. They surround Grozny, which is the capital of Chechnya. They just shell the shit out of it and deliberately destroy civilian neighborhoods. And it's this completely horrifying war where they arrive at the strategy of just pulverizing the population in the submission. So, he and everyone around him internalizes that war as a great defining Russian victory that has to be repeated over and over again, and they've really internalized these lessons of: “Atrocities are the way to go, and that's what will really keep us acting as a great power.” And then you see them deploying it in Syria fifteen or sixteen years later and now repeating it in Ukraine, where it is not working for them at all militarily. But that is why they arrived at this strategy—that seems both barbaric and completely irrational from the outside—is seeing it as a necessity for them.

HANNAH: Why do you say the war has not been working for Russia militarily? There have been no signs yet of this invasion slowing down, and it's not as though Ukraine is on the verge of some sort of victory here.

FISHER: Well, partly, their strategy is just not matched up with the situation on the ground in Ukraine because they don't have the capital surrounded there. So, they're conducting the strategy on cities that certainly do not feel peripheral to the people living there. But strategically, Bucha is not important to the outcome of the war. So, if they terrorize the civilian population of Bucha into not fighting back, that doesn't achieve anything for them. And if anything, it just sends the message to the rest of Ukraine: “Boy, you better fight like hell, because this is what you might be facing if the territory where your favorite aunt and uncle live is taken over by Russian forces.” So, it's backfiring pretty significantly within Ukraine and then also obviously internationally because it is just further galvanizing the Western-led coalition around backing Ukrainian forces.

HANNAH: Here's the last question, Max. Knowing everything you know—and you study this and cover this day in, day out—are you hopeful? Can we see an end in sight to the war in Ukraine? I think that's the most important thing people are wondering.

FISHER: I have no idea how this war is going to turn out. I just have no clue. I didn't know if it was going to happen in the first place. People are asking me weeks out and up until the day before it happened, “Is Russia going to invade?” And I had no idea. I'll be honest about that. There are a lot of military analysts who are looking at this and making what sound like very credible projections to me about at what point the various sides reach exhaustion. And I'm sure that's true. But there's so many factors outside of that.

If there's one thing about this that does seem encouraging, it's that this, along with a few other conflicts, seem to really underscore and hopefully send a message to the world that war is just not a very effective way to achieve political ends. I'm sure there are times where it has been effective in the last twenty years, but certainly most of the major examples I can think of—most of the occupation of Afghanistan, obviously the war in Iraq, a lot of the war in Syria—it does not seem to achieve the ends that the instigators were hoping for. And you certainly hope leaders and military leaders around the world are taking note of that.

HANNAH: Thanks so much, Max, for joining us.

I'm Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special thanks to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Thanks to our producer Caroline Gray, our associate producer and editor Luke Taylor, and Frank Schneegas for his archival support. If you enjoyed what you've heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Do write and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there. See you next time.

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