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The Observer view on Russia’s crimes against humanity in Ukraine | Observer editorial
Vladimir Putin’s regime will be held to account for the atrocities it is meting out to defenceless civilians
The war in Ukraine has entered its third week, yet still Russia’s once vaunted armed forces are struggling to control much of the country. These blundering heirs to the Red Army are said to be tightening their grip on Kyiv, but the outcome remains deeply uncertain. The aura of invincibility that once enveloped Russia’s military is destroyed. Its reputation lies in ruins amid the rubble of invasion. Frustration over the slow pace of advance has led to a change in tactics. Instead of directly engaging the resistance, the Russians have besieged major cities and taken to long-range shelling and bombing by artillery, missiles and air strikes. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says more Ukrainian civilians than soldiers are being killed as a result.
This cowardly, reckless policy has inevitably led to atrocities, such as last week’s lethal attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol. That vile act and the often repeated, deliberate, indiscriminate targeting of civilian areas and the humanitarian corridors supposedly protected by local ceasefires self-evidently constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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