In an unprecedented move, more than 100 leading medical journals from around the world called for the abolition of all nuclear weapons in an op-ed published Tuesday.
“The prevention of any use of nuclear weapons is […] an urgent public health priority and fundamental steps must also be taken to address the root cause of the problem — by abolishing nuclear weapons,” the editorial argues, adding that current non-proliferation efforts are “inadequate to protect the world’s population against the threat of nuclear war.”
“As editors of health and medical journals worldwide, we call on health professionals to alert the public and our leaders to this major danger to public health and the essential life support systems of the planet — and urge action to prevent it,” they write. The co-authors include the editors-in-chief of the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine.
The piece, which was sponsored by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, notes that the risk of nuclear war has gone up in recent years due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and increased tensions on the Korean Peninsula. The authors slammed nuclear states for failing to pursue total denuclearization in good faith, a key provision of the Cold War-era Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement that limits which states have access to nuclear weapons.
The article’s release is set to coincide with the 78th anniversary of the American nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those strikes killed as many as 200,000 Japanese civilians, not including those who may have died from cancer and other radiation-related illnesses in later years.
As the editorial notes, the impact of nuclear war today would likely be far worse. Researchers have found that a war involving roughly two percent of the world’s nukes could kill 120 million people directly. And a full-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia could lead to “nuclear winter,” in which the vast majority of humans would perish and civilization as we know it would cease to exist.
The call also comes as millions of people are flocking to theaters to watch ‘Oppenheimer,’ the new Christopher Nolan film about the scientist who led the program that created the atomic bomb. Notably, the movie has faced criticism for not portraying the aftermath of American attacks on Japan and the long-term health consequences of nuclear testing.
The editorial is unlikely to get a warm reception from U.S. officials, who have long argued that security considerations make denuclearization impossible in the near term. And some experts argue that full denuclearization would actually raise the risk of cataclysmic war between the world’s military powers, which have assiduously avoided direct clashes since acquiring the ultimate weapon.
“Nuclear weapons took great power war off the agenda of international politics,” Michael Desch of Notre Dame University told RS earlier this year. And, as Desch noted, the total number of nuclear weapons has dropped dramatically from its high of 65,000 warheads in the mid-1980s.
The Biden administration has so far paid little attention to nuclear negotiations of any sort, though it recently offered to restart nuclear talks with Russia and China “without preconditions.”
The op-ed, for its part, offers three concrete steps that could reduce nuclear risks short of full abolition. One suggestion is for states to adopt a “no first use” policy, meaning that they would only use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack on their territory. Another is to take nukes off “hair-trigger alert,” which would lengthen decision-making windows in case of an apparent attack. Finally, the physicians call on states at war to “pledge publicly and unequivocally that they will not use nuclear weapons in these conflicts.”
But, as the authors note, none of these steps would eliminate the risk of nuclear apocalypse.
“The danger is great and growing,” the medical experts argue. “The nuclear armed states must eliminate their nuclear arsenals before they eliminate us.”
Presidents typically announce controversial personnel and policy decisions on a Friday to ensure that the Saturday papers, which are not widely read, are charged with informing the general public. This was the case this past Friday, when President Joe Biden appointed CIA director William Burns to the Cabinet. President Harry S. Truman, who created the CIA in 1947, favored the depoliticization of the agency and its directors, which is why he initially chose professional military officers to be the director of central intelligence. No CIA director was appointed to the cabinet until the Reagan administration several decades later.
It is ironic that Biden chose Burns for the cabinet because I believe Burns was appointed to CIA in part to depoliticize the role of the director in the wake of the failed stewardship of CIA directors Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel in the Trump administration. Too many CIA directors in the past were particularly bad choices because they were too close to partisan politics. Such directors as George H.W. Bush (the Ford administration); William Casey (the Reagan administration); and Mike Pompeo (the Trump administration) were bad choices because of their partisan views. As president, George H.W. Bush appointed Robert Gates to lead the CIA because Gates’ loyalty to the president (and the entire Bush family) could be assumed. Barack Obama’s appointment of John Brennan was similarly flawed, and Brennan—like Gates—was more concerned with serving the White House than telling truth to power.
When George H.W. Bush was named director of the CIA in 1976, he asked President Gerald Ford to place him in the cabinet. Ford rejected that request and, upon reflection, Bush agreed that it would have been an inappropriate move. When Bush became president in 1989, he refused to give cabinet status to either William Webster or Bob Gates.
A strong and independent CIA director is essential to deal with White House pressures to ensure that intelligence assessments support policy. The Carter administration scrutinized CIA director Stansfield Turner’s testimony on arms control because it wanted to make sure that Turner would tell the Congress that CIA’s monitoring of any strategic arms control agreement would be foolproof. Vice President Dick Cheney made numerous trips to the CIA in the run-up to the Iraq War to make sure that CIA intelligence supported White House claims regarding Iraqi weapons of mass production. Donald Trump relied on CIA director Pompeo to put pressure on the intelligence directorate to justify withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord.
These are important considerations regarding the policy role of CIA directors, which is why it was disconcerting to observe the mishandling and misunderstanding of the issue by the mainstream media, particularly by the New York Times. On Saturday, Michael Shear’s article in the Times was headlined ”Biden Makes CIA Director Member of the Cabinet Again,” which incorrectly assumed that the CIA director was traditionally a member of the cabinet. But the CIA is not a policy making institution, and presidents initially did not appoint intelligence directors to their cabinets.
President Ronald Reagan broke this important tradition in 1981, when he made CIA director William Casey a cabinet member. Casey believed that cabinet status gave him a platform for shaping national security policy. He took advantage of this appointment to shape or politicize the intelligence of the CIA and to manage the Iran-Contra operation. In his important memoir, Secretary of State George Shultz stressed that he was aware that Casey and his deputy, Bob Gates, were shaping intelligence on the Soviet Union, so he discounted it.
President Donald Trump placed CIA directors Pompeo and Haspel in his cabinet, and Pompeo reliably tried to politicize intelligence on such sensitive policy issues as Iran. In view of Haspel’s role in the sadistic CIA program of torture and abuse, it was particularly inexorable to place her in such an important institution.
William Burns is far and away the best CIA director in recent memory, perhaps in the 75 years of its history, and clearly the national security heavyweight in the Biden administration. Burns repeatedly denies that he is engaged in the diplomacy of the Biden administration, but he has taken on a substantive and significant policy role. His numerous trips to key capitals belie his denials regarding diplomatic activism. It is difficult to believe that he has not taken part in policy discussions, particularly in view of the limited experience and knowledge of the Biden national security team (Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is traveling to Tonga this week to open the U.S. embassy there).
In view of Burns’ extensive experience in sensitive diplomatic matters, it is reasonable to assume that he will be asked to contribute to discussions on sensitive policy issues. Burns repeatedly states that he is not engaged in diplomacy, but he traveled to Kyiv and Moscow with warnings of last year’s Russian invasion. And Burns, who conducted secret diplomacy with Iran on behalf of the Obama administration, traveled to Beijing for Biden to open lines of communication. It is up to Burns to ensure that he isn’t tempted to somehow shape intelligence analysis to a particular policy.
This should have been one of the major lessons of the CIA’s intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq War, when the British intelligence chief wrote a secret memorandum for the British Prime Minister, charging that the White House and CIA director George Tenet were shaping U.S. intelligence to U.S. policy regarding weapons of mass destruction. When the Soviet Union was heading toward dissolution in the 1980s, CIA director Casey and his deputy, Gates, “shaped” U.S. intelligence to paint a picture of a threatening Soviet Union in order to justify increased defense spending. Gates, who was a weather vane for all of Casey’s hard-line views, finally acknowledged in his memoir that he watched Casey “on issue after issue, sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued.”
Burns has a well-deserved reputation for integrity, but he could be tested by the Biden administration, particularly in an election year.
Those of us who are attentive to the lessons of the past will remember that the architects of the second Gulf War, the two-part crusade to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s nefarious despotism and bring the blessings of democracy to the Arab Islamic Middle East, only belatedly discovered the fact that the divide between Sunnis and Shiites and the persistence of deep tribal cleavages were the fundamental realities we inherited in a newly “liberated” Iraq. Armchair theorists had spoken of an Iraqi middle class yearning for civic freedom, and of a reformed Islam waiting to find expression in “Islamic democracy,” something spiritually akin to the Christian Democratic parties that were so influential in Western Europe in the two-and-a-half decades after World War II. One read article after article of this type in Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard. Even Stanley Kurtz, who was very cognizant of the tribal character of Iraqi society, did not think it would prove to be an insurmountable obstacle. But these visionary hopes, marked by ignorance of the facts on the ground and the democratic triumphalism—the “End of History”—that dominated Western thought after the collapse of Communism, proved to be catastrophic illusions.
Turning to the Russo-Ukrainian War that has raged since February 23, 2022, the same mix of historical ignorance and utopian expectations has clouded the Western response to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. But this time, there has yet to be an acknowledgement of the most relevant fact on the ground, namely the deep divide in Ukraine between the Galician Party, rooted in the west of the country and now dominant in Kiev, which is committed to expunging any Russian cultural and spiritual presence in Ukraine, and the Muscovite Party, which sees Russia and Ukraine not as enemies but as spiritual, if not exactly political, brothers.
Since the Maidan Revolution of 2014, secretly encouraged and strongly supported by the United States, the Galician Party has been triumphant, encouraging the comprehensive de-Russification of Ukraine, even if Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians and the majority of them speak Russian at home. Fourteen thousand Russophone Ukrainians were killed in “anti-terrorist” campaigns in the east of the country after the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014 (which had been arbitrarily zoned to Ukraine by then-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 at a time when intra-Soviet Union “borders” did not really matter). There was brutality on the “separatist” side, too. Compounding matters, the new Ukrainian government made no serious effort to implement the Minsk II agreements of 2015. These would have given language rights and some cultural autonomy to the Donbas (and other Russian-oriented regions in the east of the country) and might have helped defuse the situation.
The mainstream narrative passes over all of this in silence, or near silence, when its purveyors talk about the sources of the present conflict. The truth, however, is much more complicated. As Nicolai Petro lays out with impressive equanimity in his recent book The Tragedy of Ukraine, the Galician Party has its roots in the nationalist ideology of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). This underground organization formed the basis of Stepan Bandera’s anti-Soviet resistance movement during and after World War II. One is obliged to have some sympathy for the Banderites, who were caught between the conflicting evils of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. However, as Petro demonstrates, that movement advocated what its chief ideologue called “Ukrainian spiritual totalitarianism.” It hated Russia far more passionately than it opposed Communism. The Russian government’s constant claim about Ukraine being a nation of Nazis is crude and hyperbolic. But important currents of Ukrainian nationalism then and now continue to have unsavory political views and connections. Groups such as the Svoboda Party and the Azov Battalion (major actors behind the 2014 Maidan rebellion) are hardly fighting for “liberal,” “democratic,” and “European” values as our political and media elites endlessly repeat. While a liberal, or at least a moderate, current is present among Ukrainian nationalists, it is far from dominant. To say that “Ukraine is fighting for democracy” is far from the truth on the ground.
As for Russia, to draw on a famous remark by Talleyrand, its invasion of Ukraine was “worse than a crime, it’s a mistake.” This point has been made brilliantly in a series of essays by the foreign policy analyst Srdja Trifkovic in ChroniclesMagazine. Trifkovic is not insensitive to Moscow’s legitimate grievances, including reckless efforts to expand NATO to include Ukraine, which run counter to the deep historical and cultural connections between Russia and Ukraine, not to mention Russia’a legitimate security interests in that part of the world. But as Trifkovic points out, if Russia’s goal remains the “demilitarization” of Ukraine, the invasion has hardly served that purpose. Quite the contrary. Indeed, as Christopher Caldwell has pointed out in the pages of the Claremont Review of Books, Ukraine, with massive NATO support, is the most militarized society on earth. That process had already begun after the Maidan Revolution and the Russian seizure of Crimea. The United States was the principal architect of this policy of massive militarization in response to the allegedly global threat of Russian “imperialism.” Here was what could call a “self-fulfilling analysis.”
Richard Pipes, the famed historian of Russia, was hardly reticent about his disdain for Russian political culture, which he associated quite one-sidedly with antisemitism and “patrimonial despotism.” But in a conversation with me at a conference on the Cold War at Hillsdale College in the fall of 2009, he proclaimed his vehement opposition to NATO expansion to include Ukraine and Georgia. Even the most liberal-minded and pro-Western Russians, he suggested, would find such a move threatening and destabilizing, an “existential threat” to the Russian nation, just as Americans would be alarmed by Russian troops in Canada or Mexico. But in the 14 years since Pipes made those remarks, the ability of the Western political class to look at things even provisionally from the Russian perspective—a sine qua non of geostrategic thinking—has nearly disappeared.
In fact, our response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by little or no soul-searching about our own significant role in the unfolding of the tragedy. Instead, we are subjected to endless moralistic effusions about Russian perfidy and the purity of the Ukrainian cause. In his fine recent book, The Roadto Ukraine: How the West Lost Its Way (please note the subtitle), the eminent sociologist Frank Furedi suggests that Western elites were so committed to “endism” (the “End of History,” facile humanitarianism, the end of war especially for the European avant-garde of humanity) that they could only see this essentially regional conflict, borne of conflicting interests and borders, as a massive assault on the post-political ethos of Western elites. Add to this dogmatic identification of Russia with the Soviet Union in many establishment conservative circles, and the Left’s disdain for the social conservatism of the Russian people, and the ground is set for angry moralism as a substitute for principled but realistic judgment in approaching relations with post-Communist Russia.
There are consequences for these precipitous moralistic judgments. The indefinite continuation of the conflict in Ukraine risks leaving that country as a charnel house, a victim of Western moralism as much as Russian aggression. In Russia itself, the regime has hardened with draconian (and ultimately counterproductive) punishments for open opposition to the war, and a growing fixation with “Nazi” efforts to surround and subvert historic Russia. The rhetoric of Russia’s ruling political class has grown more brutal and crass.
Contrary to legend, Putin has never been particularly nostalgic for Bolshevism. He strongly supported the teaching of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Russian high schools. But in February, a leader of Putin’s United Russia Party in the Duma called for eliminating “garbage” such as The Gulag Archipelago from the school curriculum, surely an ominous sign. Thankfully, other members of the ruling party strongly responded to this crude assault on Russian national memory and the greatest anti-totalitarian masterpiece of our time. For the time being, Solzhenitsyn remains in the school curriculum. But there is no doubt that Russia is moving in the wrong direction, in part because of Western imprudence and also because of the ossification of a political order that lacks sufficient civic openness and vitality.
In truth, Solzhenitsyn represents a fundamental example for the future of a decent Russia: an unwavering defense of conscience and human dignity, an adamant refusal to conflate the best of historic Russia with crude authoritarianism or soul-destroying totalitarianism, a humane, moderate, and self-limiting nationalism or patriotism, and a desire for equitable dealings between Russia and Ukraine. Extreme Ukrainian nationalists hated him and all things Russian. But he never reciprocated such hatred.
In the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago, the great Russian writer lambasted his fellow Russians for turning a blind eye to legitimate Ukrainian grievances over the centuries. He believed Ukraine should be free to go its own way but not with unjust “Leninist” borders left over from the Soviet period. In Rebuilding Russia, Solzhenitsyn eloquently reminded his Ukrainian interlocutors that both the Ukrainian and Russian peoples were victims of an inhuman ideology built on the twin foundation of violence and mendacity. Famine, terror, and collectivization afflicted both great peoples, even if Ukrainians suffered particularly cruelly in 1932 and 1933. Shared opposition to totalitarianism ought to shape and deepen common bonds built in suffering and a shared defense of human dignity. Like most Russians, Solzhenitsyn opposed indefinite NATO expansion (he died in 2008). But half-Russian and half-Ukrainian himself, he once wrote that “If, God forbid, there is war between Russia and Ukraine, I will have nothing to do with it, nor will I permit my sons to join.” Solzhenitsyn is a living reproach to the extreme nationalists on both sides: his repeated calls for “repentance and self-limitation” can perhaps challenge and modify the thinking of frenzied partisans.
We in the United States (and the West more broadly) must not associate legitimate opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine with enduring animosity to all things Russian or support for the exclusion of Russia from the community of nations. That is neither just nor in our national interest. Moreover, serious investigation and reflection upon our own culpability in the tragedy is necessary if we are not to give rise to a dangerous and eventually tragic escalation of enmity and conflict between East and West. That is a much-needed first step in avoiding a fatal fall into the abyss.
The recent US decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine is immoral, unethical, and criminal. We’ve already seen the horrific results of the use of such weapons – civilians mutilated and murdered (often decades later) in Iraq and Southeast Asia, for example, and in Lebanon.
In addition to the ethical reasons not to send these weapons to Ukraine, there are pragmatic reasons why, from a military perspective. They are pointless for Ukraine, in spite of Western promises that they will “do more damage across a larger area than standard unitary artillery shells by releasing bomblets, or submunitions.”
In reality, while covering a wider area than a conventional high explosive munition, the cluster bomblets do not inflict more powerful damage, certainly not against Russian fortified positions. Their use is mainly for targeting troops in the open and lightly armoured vehicles. Not a game changer for Kiev.
According to former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter, “these are the worst weapon in the world for trench warfare. With trench warfare, you need a high explosive round that collapses bunkers, that collapses trenches.”
If the US knows that cluster munitions won’t change facts on the ground for Ukraine, why is it sending them? Because, as President Joe Biden himself has said, Ukraine is “running out of ammunition and we’re low on it.” So, the US might as well offload its old stock of cluster munitions. They will not, as Biden claimed, “stop those tanks from rolling.” Nor will they – as the Biden administration claims – “save civilian lives.” They will almost certainly be used to kill, maim, and terrorize more Donbass civilians immediately and for years to come.
US Colonel Douglas Macgregor has emphasized that the cluster munitions have a high dud rate. According to Ritter, close to 40% of them fail to explode. Macgregor also highlighted how children are “attracted to these bright shiny objects that look like baseballs,” so insidious is their design.
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan assures us thatKiev will not misuse the clusters. He claims that “Ukraine is committed to post-conflict de-mining efforts to mitigate any potential harm to civilians,” and that “Ukraine has provided written assurances that it is going to use these in a very careful way that is aimed at minimizing any risk to civilians.”
The US never signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions – which prohibits all use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions – but didn’t mind virtue signalling its abhorrence of them when it lobbed accusations against Russia (also not a signatory of the convention) on February 28, 2022, with Biden’s then press secretary, Jen Psaki, calling the use of cluster munitions a potential “war crime.”
As usual, it’s a heinous war crime when a US enemy supposedly does it, but not when an ally – or the US itself – actually does. As for Ukraine’s feeble promises to not use the cluster munitions against civilians, it has already been doing so since 2014.
Ukraine’s history of cluster-bombing civilians
By way of a personally witnessed example, in late March 2022, I visited the site of a Ukrainian missile attack that earlier that month had killed 22 civilians and injured 33 more. Because the Ukrainian-fired Tochka-U missile was intercepted, not all of its 50 cassettes of cluster munitions inside exploded in the city streets. Otherwise, the bloodbath would have been much worse. Then, in April 2022, Ukrainian forces targeted a railway station in Kramatorsk, likewise firing a Tochka-U with a cluster munition, killing a reported 50 people. Western media predictably accused Russia of the war crime, although investigations showed the missile emanated from Ukrainian-held territory to the southwest.
But like most of Kiev’s war crimes against Donbass civilians, its use of cluster munitions didn’t start in 2022. Back in 2014, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on Ukrainian government forces’ use of cluster munitions in populated areas in Donetsk city. An October 2 attack on the centre of Donetsk that included the use of cluster munition rockets killed an employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The New York Times likewise reported that on several occasions in October 2014, “the Ukrainian Army appears to have fired cluster munitions into the heart of Donetsk, unleashing a weapon banned in much of the world into a rebel-held city with a peacetime population of more than one million.” Citing physical evidence and interviews with witnesses and victims, the newspaper wrote there were “clear signs that cluster munitions had been fired from the direction of army-held territory.”
Ukrainian ‘petal mines’ continue to maim
But these aren’t the only clusters Ukraine has fired on Donbass civilians. In fact, over the course of last year, I documented the aftermath of Ukraine firing rockets containing cassettes of internationally-banned PFM-1 “petal” mines, over 300 of the mines per rocket.
Due to their design, they generally glide to the ground without exploding, until someone or something steps on or otherwise disturbs them.
According to authorities in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Ukraine began firing these tiny, indiscriminate mines on March 6, 2022, during the battles for Mariupol, and then from May 18, 2022, into DPR and Kharkov Region settlements.
Since first documenting the aftermath of Ukraine’s use of the mines in central Donetsk in late July, 2022, I’ve interviewed victims, and reported on the painstaking work of Russian sappers to locate and destroy the mines. As of July 25 this year, 124 civilians have been injured by the mines, including ten children. Three civilians died as a result of their injuries.
Ukraine ratified the Ottawa Convention (the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention) on December 27, 2005, and it entered into force on June 1, 2006. Accordingly, Ukraine was obliged to never use anti-personnel mines, nor to stockpile or transfer them, and should have—but hasn’t—destroyed its stock. Of its 6 million stock of the PFM-1 mines, reportedly Ukraine still has over 3.3 million.
And while Human Rights Watch did finally address Ukraine’s use of the mines against civilians in one location – the city of Izium, north of Donetsk – the highly partial Western-funded NGO failed to investigate, much less highlight, Ukraine’s widespread use of the mines on Donbass civilian areas. HRW, as I wrote in March, then advised Ukraine to investigate itself for its use of the prohibited mines.
Western weapons used to kill Donbass civilians
It should be mentioned that over the course of its now nine-year war against Donbass, Ukraine has been using conventional NATO munitions to slaughter and maim civilians. The high explosive shells Ukraine fires throughout Donbass cities and towns, but also countless times in the very heart of Donetsk, tear people apart, leaving mangled bodies and remains on streets and sidewalks, and in marketplaces.
On July 22, Ukrainian forces allegedly shelled Russian journalists in Zaporozhye Region with cluster munitions, killing one and injuring three others.
These deliberate attacks on the media, on civilians’ homes, hospitals, infrastructure, and on civilians themselves should be condemned as loudly as Ukraine’s firing of petal mines and of cluster munitions in general. But the US announcement that it would send cluster munitions to Ukraine resulted in some mild tutting from other Western nations, but no seriously strong condemnation. Canada is one of the nations voicing at least some objection to sending cluster bombs, the leadership in Ottawa probably feeling it ought to mildly protest, given Canada’s convention.
The Canadian government recently stated that it is fully against the use of cluster munitions and is “committed to putting an end to the effects cluster munitions have on civilians – particularly children.” Yet aside from polite grumblings regarding the US clusters, I’ve seen no Canadian condemnation of Ukraine’s repeated use of cluster munitions on the civilians of Donbass.
But the real criminals here are the US government, which knows sending its cluster munitions won’t actually help Ukraine fight the Russian military in any tangible way, but that it is highly likely Ukraine will instead use them against Donbass civilians. Apparently, that’s just fine with the crocodile-tear-crying US hypocrites.
Update:
RT: “Cluster Munitions Hit Passenger Bus in Makeevka-Yasinovataya (Donetsk People’s Republic) – the vehicle came under fire from Kiev’s forces – local authorities”
In May 2023, the United Nations reported 8,791 civilians have died and 14,815 have been injured in Ukraine since February 2022. Of those, 1,971 have been killed and 2,636 injured on territory occupied by the Russian Federation.
Western news outlets have tended to only provide details on a regular basis of those casualties suffered on the Ukrainian side of the front line. Exceptions to this — when the western media has widely reported on casualties behind Russian lines — have largely been when Russian forces have been accused of atrocities.
As Ukraine began an offensive against Russian forces in the fall of 2022, instances of civilian deaths resulting from Ukrainian missiles, rockets, drones, artillery and small arms fire on Russian-held territory inevitably increased.
Just as western news sources regularly report on deaths from missile, drone and artillery attacks on Ukrainian-held territory, Russian news outlets frequently report deaths and injuries on Russian-held territory.
A recent example is when the Russian news agency TASS and other Russian outlets reported one death and tens of injuries after Ukrainian forces shelled what Russians call Makeevka — Makiivka in Ukrainian — in the Donetsk region in July 2023. Some western news outlets didn’t report on the attack at all.
Civilian casualties prior to 2022
The war in Ukraine precedes February 2022, so statistics amassed since then aren’t telling the whole story of the conflict.
In the West, the war is largely perceived to have begun in February 2022 when Vladimir Putin’s government launched what it described as a “special military operation” and invaded Ukraine. But for all intents and purposes, the war has been going on since 2014.
Early that year, the pro-Russian democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in a far from bloodless coup. That event has been described as a revolution by the current Ukrainian government.
In response, regions in eastern Ukraine — where pro-Russian sentiment is the strongest — saw separatists seize control with scant Russian assistance. These separatists were soon fighting against Ukrainian forces as Russian support began to increase.
According to the Russian government’s Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, more than 2,600 civilians died and at least 5,500 were wounded in fighting in the separatist regions of Ukraine as of February 2022. Many of them were killed or wounded by Ukrainian forces seeking to crush the separatists.
These figures are supported by data from the West. In January 2022, the United Nations recorded 3,106 conflict-related civilian deaths and as many as 7,000 wounded in fighting in Ukraine up to that point. During that period, most of the fighting was over separatist-controlled territory.
Growing threats to civilians
As Ukraine is increasingly provided with long-range weapons by the West, the potential for civilian casualties as a result of Ukrainian missile and long-range artillery attacks has increased.
While many of these weapons have good accuracy, they nonetheless are too often fired by both sides on the basis of inaccurate or flawed intelligence.
Even after the fighting has moved on from a particular area, the war leaves behind a legacy of unexploded munitions. These can range from unexploded bombs and artillery shells to mines.
The United States — also not a signatory to the convention — has recently decided to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions from its own stocks. That decision can only increase their use by both Ukraine and Russia, meaning that civilians on both sides of the front line will inevitably fall victim to unexploded munitions over time.
Claiming the moral high ground in any war isn’t just about justifying a war effort — it’s also about how a war is fought.
Civilian casualties in war are unavoidable but can be mitigated. Both Ukraine and Russia, sadly but inevitably, have plenty of civilian blood on their hands.
