Beevor is one of my favorite historians:
Putin’s deliberate brutality in Ukraine has a backstory
The past holds Russia prisoner. This cruelty in war shows how.
Antony Beevor | June 2, 2026Antony Beevor is the author, most recently, of “Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs.”The deliberate brutality of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has raised a debate about its origins. Were killings such as the 2022 Bucha massacre “casual savagery,” as one commentator put it? Or did they derive from an ancient, underlying assumption in Russia that conspicuous cruelty is a necessary weapon of war?
One can never generalize about a whole nation, especially not Russia, with all its component nationalities and its split between Slavophiles and Westerners. Nor can there be such a thing as a DNA-based national character. At the same time, most countries are influenced, at least subconsciously, by a certain self-image or national narrative. Perhaps ever since the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, the Russian attitude has been conditioned to the idea that overwhelming violence — fire and sword, terror, mass rape, looting, pointless torture — is natural if not essential in combat.
Europe during the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century was equally horrific. The difference came later as the western half of the continent experienced the Enlightenment. Rules limiting the suffering of warfare, such as the Lieber Code in the United States, began to take hold. The Red Cross was founded in Europe after the Battle of Solferino in 1859, and by the turn of the century, the first Hague Convention had been held. All this passed Russia by as it continued to expand its empire with the same old slaughter into the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia and the Far East.
While Europe had been humanizing itself, the Russian Empire was suffering occasional explosions of violence. The insurrection of 1773 led by the Cossack peasant Yemelyan Pugachev prompted Alexander Pushkin to write of “Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.” Such events were often considered to be outbursts of Russia’s mixed heritage. The great writer Maxim Gorky, who knew the impoverished reality of peasant and proletarian circles better than any Bolshevik leader, had no doubts. During the revolution in February 1917, which overthrew the czarist regime, he visited the ruins of the Okhrana headquarters in Petrograd. There, he predicted to the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov that the uprising was bound to lead to “Asiatic savagery.”
During the Russian Civil War that followed, the captain of the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Montrose wrote home from the Crimean coast in 1919. “War has made fiends of the illiterate, simple-minded superstitious Russian peasants, and devils of the reckless, drunken pleasure-loving aristocracy they wish to exterminate,” he recounted. “Both sides are equally barbarous, and the torture applied to prisoners is so inhuman that I cannot write it here. Every man carries a grenade fastened to his tunic button, with which to blow off his own head if captured.” . . .
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/06/02/putin-russia-legacy-military-cruelty/
