By Scott Taylor
Last week, the press office of the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Ottawa distributed a collection of video links to Canadian media outlets.
In total there were 15 separate video clips, all of which contained alleged atrocities being committed by Ukrainian soldiers against Russian prisoners of war.
To the best of my knowledge, no Canadian media have broadcast these gruesome scenes for the simple reason that they are so graphic, that even a warning to viewers about the content would not be suffice to avert trauma.
One of the clips is a literal ‘snuff flick’ wherein a Ukrainian captor stabs a bound Russian prisoner repeatedly in the throat and chest. The Russian shrieks in fear and pain, then drops his head as he dies. The jubilant Ukrainian then brandishes his bloodied dagger towards the camera and shouts “Slava Ukraine!”
There are a number of these videos that depict petrified Russian soldiers being shot while bound in captivity.
Some clips show badly wounded Russians being executed rather than given medical treatment while others reveal bloodied and bruised Russian prisoners being physically tortured and tormented.
Another common theme of these videos is that of Ukrainians desecrating the corpses of dead Russian soldiers. One such scene has more than one Ukrainian soldier urinating on the snow-covered face of a dead Russian infantryman.
In a particularly disturbing clip, a Ukrainian soldier is filmed stabbing his dagger into the eye socket of a dead Russian trooper.
Also illustrated was the Ukrainian terror tactic wherein they take the cell phones from dead Russian soldiers and then use them to call the deceased’s family in order to taunt them with the news that their loved one has been killed.
I have to believe that the rationale behind the Russian Foreign Ministry’s decision to circulate these videos was to undermine the current overwhelming popularity of the Ukrainian defenders among the Canadian public.
By illustrating these atrocities committed by Ukrainian soldiers perhaps the Kremlin thinks it will invoke a measure of sympathy for those young men serving in the Russian military. If that was the case, they are forgetting the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine.
Sorry, Vladimir Putin instructed his Commanders to conduct a “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine.
Not that anyone can justify the execution of prisoners or the desecration of corpses by the Ukrainian military, but those Russians would not have been captured or killed if they were not deployed into Ukraine in the first place.
It is also a wildly divergent public relations course from the early days of the invasion when Russian media were proclaiming an almost bloodless liberation.
As the Russian offensives were halted and then driven back by the Ukrainian defenders, even Putin’s spokesman had to admit that their losses had been ‘significant.’
Now the Kremlin is sending out videos of their soldiers being humiliated and brutalized at the hands of victorious Ukrainians.
One would think that such images would be ruthlessly suppressed and vehemently denounced as a ‘hoax’ by Russian authorities.
It will be pretty hard for the Kremlin to question the authenticity of these video clips when it is their own embassies circulating them.
If it is true that Putin is mobilizing reservists and conscripts to bolster his badly battered forces still waging war in Ukraine, then these videos will not be good for recruiting volunteers.
I can only imagine the impact such images would have on your average Russian soldier.
As for the Russian public’s reaction to these videos, one would think it would be that of initial revulsion at what the Ukrainians have done to their soldiers, and then a sense of betrayal on the part of Putin.
Liberated people don’t execute their saviours and then urinate on their corpses.
One example of public outrage at seeing their soldier’s body desecrated by foreign fighters occurred during the U.S. led international intervention in war torn Somalia. In October 1993, Somali insurgents shot down a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter over Mogadishu.
Word soon spread that the body of an American soldier was being dragged through the streets by an angry mob. Toronto Star reporter Paul Watson was in Mogadishu covering the war and he was able to snap a photo of U.S. Army staff Sergeant William Dand Cleveland’s body being dragged and beaten by enraged Somali’s. That photo was first published in the Star and then re-printed in many American newspapers.
That image won Watson a Pulitzer price and the public outcry forced American politicians to end the intervention. Many analysts have opined that this single photo was what kept the U.S. from intervening to prevent the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
If one photo of a single soldier’s body being violated can cause the U.S. population to protest military interventions, I cannot wait to see what reaction the Russian public will have to those 15 videos.
In the meantime, it would be wise counsel for Canadians to convey to our Ukrainian friends that violations of the Geneva convention cannot be condoned under any circumstance.
