Russia’s brutality in Ukraine has barely begun

Much of the world has been shocked by Russian brutality in just the four partly occupied Ukrainian provinces. Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose willingness to sacrifice Russian soldiers knows no limits, could still conquer the rest of Ukraine if the coming Ukrainian counteroffensive fails and Western military and financial support are withdrawn.  

What would a Russian occupation of Ukraine look like? If the behavior of Russian forces since the invasion and Russian history are a guide, worse than anything since the Nazi occupation of Europe.  

As a start, Ukraine will cease to exist as a sovereign nation and Russia will wipe out any trace that it ever did, from the Ukrainian flag to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyiv Patriarchate) to the Ukrainian language.

The Russian occupation regime will burn Ukrainian history textbooks in public and indoctrinate Ukrainian children with a Russian identity (both happened in the occupied regions); resisting parents could lose their children. Putin contends that Russians and Ukrainians are a “single” people, a formula that leaves no room for a Ukrainian identity. In the 19th century, Catherine the Great, whose statue stands in Putin’s Kremlin reception room, and her allies erased Poland from the European map for more than a century.

The occupation regime will eradicate the Ukrainian elite by killing or arresting thousands of political leaders, military officers, professors, journalists and clerics. The Russian forces invading Ukraine, according to U.S. intelligence, had lists of Ukrainians to be “killed or sent to camps.” 

Likewise, during World War II, to decapitate Polish leadership in the part of Poland that came under their control, Soviet forces murdered thousands of Polish army officers and intellectual leaders in the Katyn Forest. 

The occupation regime will establish concentration camps throughout Ukraine for interrogation and torture. The Russian Federal Penitentiary Service is currently constructing 24 such camps, which are called “filtration” camps, just for the partly-occupied provinces. Ukrainian entrepreneur Anna Vorosheva, who was released from the Olenivka camp outside of Donetsk, spent three months there listening to the screams of tortured Ukrainians. In the 1930s Stalin set up a hard labor camp system, known as the Gulag, where more than 1.5 million Russians perished.  

Former Ukrainian soldiers will be mercilessly dealt with. Earlier in the war 53 Ukrainian prisoners of war in the Olenivka camp burned to death in an explosion condemned by Ukraine as a deliberate murder. (Vorosheva insists that it was done “as a convenient way” to disguise the fact that the soldiers had already been tortured to death.) During the Russian civil war following the 1917 revolution, Bolsheviks forced 50 captured enemy soldiers, who had surrendered on a promise of safety, one by one into a blast furnace. 

Russia will force demographic change on Ukraine. Putin recently signed a decree allowing for mass deportation to Russia of Ukrainians who refuse to adopt Russian passports. Russia is likely to replace them with ethnic Russians, similar to population transfers on the Crimean Peninsula after Russia illegally annexed it in 2014. Russian history is no stranger to forced deportations — between 1800 and the Russian Revolution, the tsars exiled more than 1 million Russian subjects to Siberia.

There are no limits to Russian brutality. A United Nations panel documented how invading soldiers not only raped Ukrainian women, but also “raped, tortured, and unlawfully confined” children. According to Ukraine’s human rights ombudswoman, Lyudmyla Denisova, Russian soldiers raped 25 girls and women, age 14-25, in a single basement in Bucha (nine became pregnant). Putin awarded medals to the “heroic” units in Bucha that committed war crimes. After the German surrender in World War II, Stalin allowed, if not encouraged, his soldiers to rape thousands of German women. The soldiers, Stalin said, “were merely having a little fun.” 

Under a Russian occupation, the once spirited, but now crushed, Ukrainians would live under a reign of terror, in constant fear of arrest, torture and execution. Let no one have any illusions about what would happen to Ukraine if Western military and financial support falters.  

Gregory J. Wallance, a writer in New York City, was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations, where he was a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team that convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. His newest book, “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia,” is due out later this year. Follow him on Twitter at @gregorywallance.