Putin is weaponizing Ukrainian civilians

Russian President Vladimir Putin rang in the New Year in Ukraine by “launching nearly 100 Shahed loitering munitions against cities across the country.” 

His targets? Ukrainian civilians — men, women and children. As Putin’s counteroffensives stall in Avdiivka, Kupiansk and elsewhere in the Donbas, the Kremlin has sought to achieve a military advantage for its beleaguered forces by putting Ukrainian noncombatants in the crosshairs of its Iranian supplied Shaded drones, Kinzhal missiles and Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bombers.

On the surface, Putin’s targeting of apartment blocks, schools and hospitals has no substantive military value. These are also war crimes and clear violations of the Geneva Convention protocols, yet Moscow and Beijing have blocked United Nations Security Council efforts to condemn Russia.

Yet as retired Navy Lt. Chuck Pfarrer points out in the Kyiv Post, there is twisted military method to Putin’s assault on Ukrainian humanity. By weaponizing Ukraine’s noncombatants, Putin is forcing Kyiv to deploy the bulk of its Patriot and other missile defensive systems in and around its major population centers. 

It is, as Pfarrer puts it, “homicidal madness.” However, it is buying Russian forces in the Donbas and in the south time and space. It is also continuing to undermine the efforts of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals to set the conditions to enable an offensive to expel Putin’s army from the Crimean Peninsula — the decisive terrain of the war. 

Putin’s sadistic willingness to kill civilians to advance his goals is no surprise. His wars and military interventions in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria also all demonstrated Putin’s determination to weaponize civilians. Russia facilitated sarin gas attacks in Syria in support of Bashir al-Assad’s corrupt regime, and Russian-backed separatists downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH 17 over the skies of eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing 298 people. 

Certainly, Putin’s style of governance on the domestic front is one that we have previously described as Murder Inc. Political opponents, journalists, recalcitrant oligarchs and anyone he perceives to be in his way are assassinated — including the 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the United Kingdom.

In the early stages of his “special military operation” in Ukraine, the killing of civilians began almost immediately. Putin’s crimes against humanity in Bucha in the opening months of the war were no accident, nor some isolated Russian military unit that had gone awry. It was “part of a deliberate and systematic effort to ruthlessly secure a route to the capital, Kyiv”— intended as a message to Ukrainians to submit or be slaughtered. This is also why Russian artillery has leveled once-vibrant and thriving cities such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka.

As the U.S. State Department has determined, “Russia’s forces have committed execution-style killings of Ukrainian men, women, and children; torture of civilians in detention through beatings, electrocution, and mock executions; rape; and, alongside other Russian officials, have deported hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians to Russia, including children who have been forcibly separated from their families.”

As the war in Ukraine devolves into trench warfare resembling World War I across most of its 600-mile front, Zelensky and his generals are reaching a critical inflection point this winter. This is largely of Washington’s making. 

Capitol Hill’s ongoing failure to fully fund the war militarily and economically in Ukraine is one major factor. So is the Biden Administration’s failed military strategy when it comes to correctly assessing what Zelensky and his generals need in terms of military capabilities and protection of Ukrainian civilians.

Defending Ukraine for as long as it takes is a recipe for a forever war. It will not win the war. It is also a recipe for ensuring Putin continues to target civilians. The former is allowing Putin to perpetrate the latter, if not unintentionally incentivizing him to do so. 

Washington must change course, and fast. Pfarrer is correct in his assessment that the Biden Administration must enable Kyiv to take “back its airspace.” Not only the airspace over Ukraine’s major population centers, but over the front lines in the Donbas and in the south in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. The Ukrainians need weapon systems to attack the Russians’ launch sites, their crews, and their missile/drone storage facilities.

Until the latter is achieved by Ukraine, as Pfarrer bluntly assesses, “Ukrainian ground commanders [are] forced to disperse troops and materiel, making the concentration of forces, their movement to the front, and even engagement with the enemy difficult — if not, at times, suicidal.”

Until Ukraine can bring Patriot missile batteries and other U.S. and NATO surface-to-air missile systems close to the front lines, Kyiv’s ability to launch counteroffensives will continue to be severely handicapped. Maneuver warfare with Bradleys and Abrams tanks will remain exceedingly difficult if not impossible.

Anything less will only continue to encourage Putin to keep targeting Ukrainian civilians and weaponizing them as a means to winning his war. Biden and Congress must end Putin’s murderous madness by fully enabling Kyiv to control its airspace and take the fight against Putin to Crimea. 

Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014. Mark Toth, an economist and entrepreneur, is a former board member of the World Trade Center, St. Louis.