Russia's war in Ukraine: where does the excess of violence come from?

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War is the primacy of the physical (symbol image)

Photo: Agromov / iStockphoto / Getty Images

I was ill the other day and, delirious with fever, spent hours watching interviews with Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine.

I had the vague idea that I might then be able to better understand where these people come from, what drives them – and possibly what drives them to commit war crimes.

The Ukrainian blogger Volodymyr Zolkin has published videos under the hashtag #ищисвоих (e.g.: #suchdeinepeople) in which he asks imprisoned Russian soldiers about their mission and their opinion on the war.

He has been doing this persistently since mid-March and has since been criticized for his actions: he is bringing the prisoners before him and violating the Geneva Conventions, according to the accusation.

Zolkin denies that.

Not much is known about the setting of the interviews, how the prisoners are treated off camera.

The records should therefore be treated with caution.

But still interesting.

There are pale, battered men from the most remote corners of the Russian Federation.

According to the information, officers, privates or even deserters, who are often lazy and surly in answering questions.

Most are evasive, tactical, taking refuge in the mantra: "We didn't know it was going to Ukraine, we thought it was a military exercise."

Poor and poorly educated

According to their own statements, many prisoners come from the provinces, report of villages without asphalted roads and water connections, of unemployment and the army as the last way out of personal misery.

They pray down what the Ukrainian interlocutors presumably want to hear: that they now understand that the Russians have attacked and sacked a peaceful, sovereign state, raped women and killed children.

That the war must end.

These men seem stressed.

They are afraid – of saying the wrong thing to Ukrainians, or of being held responsible for the right answer when they return home.

But every now and then there are strange moments of authenticity.

A 23-year-old suspected staff officer asks why Ukraine really wants to belong to Europe.

He couldn't understand that at all.

How to answer that?

When the mother trusts state propaganda more than her son

It gets even more irritating when the prisoners call their relatives in front of the camera.

At the other end of the line there is by no means only relief at finally hearing the voice of the missing son, husband or brother.

Rather, an oppressive silence, an overall rough, fateful tone, coupled with distrust.

A woman does not want to speak to her husband at all because the conversation is being recorded.

The next one now has a new boyfriend.

There's the type of sighing grandmother who complains about how distressed she is about the situation - and forgets to ask how the prisoner of war is actually feeling.

Or the mother who believes her own son less than Russian state propaganda.

Zolkin goes to great lengths to unravel Putin's lies.

He sometimes leads grotesque arguments.

He often has to explain to the families that the personal experience of the soldiers, their direct experience of the reality of war, is probably more credible than the outrageous claims made by Russian state television.

He has to disentangle appearance and reality.

The interviewees are or pretend to be clueless, many do not seem particularly educated, they listlessly reel off the lies they have inhaled at home.

This ignorance is shocking because it is paired with a certain unwillingness to overcome it.

Whether out of laziness or fear, who knows.

The interviews tell a lot about how dictatorships work.

If you want to manipulate and rule undisturbed, you have to keep the population in ignorance.

Where critical thinking is not taught, nobody questions undesirable developments.

We Germans know that only too well from bitter experience.

Russia has always thought highly of its intelligentsia, which is now leaving in droves.

Recently, a Russian exile on Facebook was outraged that even her educated compatriots, the intellectual elite of all people, condemned her for her criticism of the regime!

"In that case, we may need to reconsider our definition of elite," one commenter aptly wrote.

But do the lack of education, the corrupt Russian educational system and the recruitment of poor provincials explain the atrocities of Bucha or Irpin?

Certainly not.

War is a state of emergency, the struggle for survival, the primacy of the physical.

We are deluding ourselves if we believe that one side, the good side, can wage a "proper," a "lawful" war that adheres to the Geneva Conventions and refrains from excessive violence.

Every war brings out the beast in us.

He can trigger a bloodlust in the groomed, always obedient German shepherd.

Or open the kennel door of the Russian Ovcharka, who has been kept short and beaten all his life.

State-sponsored excesses

It is difficult to gauge how violent a population is.

But: In Russia, violence is state-sponsored.

Violent excesses in families, by security forces, the military or homophobic gangs are rarely punished adequately - and often not even reported.

More than 40 draft laws punishing domestic violence have been defeated in Russia so far - the political will to sanction such crimes is almost zero.

"He hits, therefore he loves" is the common justification for violence in partnership.

The fact that the state looks the other way and the prevailing impunity make torturing prison guards just as possible as bloody initiation rituals by older superiors in the army.

I think Russians know more everyday violence.

The people – especially the soldiers drilled in the barracks – have gotten used to them.

I've lived in Russia for years and seen a lot of unleashed fights.

Often alcohol was involved, sometimes it was pure demonstrations of power.

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It was an open secret that police officers beat people during interrogations.

A friend's hand was crushed with a rifle butt by a superior while he was doing military service because he had secretly bought a bottle of vodka.

Another was committed to a psychiatric hospital and tortured for refusing military service.

I myself got a fist in the face by a stranger in the middle of the street.

irrationality and esotericism

"Russians have a different relationship to violence and death," said political scientist Florence Gaub recently, which brought her a shitstorm and accusations of racism, mainly because she denied that Russians belonged to Europe.

But she's right about her attitude toward violence.

Gaub also sees the failure to come to terms with Stalin's crimes as the cause, the terror, the Gulags, the Holodomor in Ukraine and the outrages of the Russian secret services.

"You can't understand Russia with your mind," said the poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyuchev in 1866 - and thus provided a cardinal argument for all those who take refuge in the irrational as soon as morality and political responsibility are at stake.

I don't have to explain or change what I can't understand.

Anyone who has lived in Russia for a long time knows this slipping into the vague when there is a risk of quarrels and unpleasant truths are brought to the table.

Then the debate ends in the mystical, inexplicable, every dispute is nipped in the bud.

The Russian Revolution is then just an obscure cosmic experiment, Kyiv the mother of all Russian cities and the Jewish President of Ukraine a Nazi.

Conspiracy stories have it easy in a country that celebrates a post-Soviet religiosity, but at the same time adheres to traditional superstitions and is not averse to the esoteric.

Where the irrational rules, people are happy to surrender to an ominous force that steers and thinks.

Hands over responsibility in pleasant indolence and becomes an object, a movable mass, cannon fodder.

Fear-filled patriotism

Many Russians love their country in a strangely complex way and almost always in demarcation – to the West, but also to the East.

"Our patriotism is mostly artificial, behind it hides fear and uncertainty," says the Russian philosopher Zipko.

»Many young people really believe that they are saving Russia, they cannot simply be condemned.

Chivalry also plays a part, Russian gullibility, docility and suggestibility.«

But what exactly is Russian about gullibility, docility and suggestibility?

There is little point in considering whether Russian soldiers are worse people than us or just victims of circumstance.

When we are overcome with despair and speechlessness at the war of aggression against Ukraine, let us remember, with historian Timothy Snyder, that our democracy needs to be defended every damn day.

That we must love her, become one with her, advancing her institutions, interfering, collaborating.

To keep her from going to the dogs.