Next level war crimes

Theater in Mariupol marked with the word “Children” in Russian before it was bombed by a Russian warplane today.

The largest hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, and more than 500 people have been taken hostage by the Russian army.  The hostages include doctors and patients who were already inside the hospital as well as 400 people in the surrounding neighborhood forced out of their homes and into the hospital by Russian soldiers where they remain today 24 hours after the hospital was taken by Russian forces.  A report this morning on MSNBC said Russian troops had set up firing positions within the hospital and were using the civilians as “human shields” to prevent Ukrainian soldiers from returning fire.

Late today came news that a Russian warplane had bombed a theater in Mariupol where hundreds of people had sought shelter. Satellite images of the building taken before the bombing show the Russian word for “Children” spelled out in large white letters on two sides of the building. Petro Andruishchenko, who works for the mayor of Mariupol, told CNN that the theater was the largest shelter "in number and size" in Mariupol. "More than a thousand people were hiding there," Andruishchenko said, but described "the probability of getting there to dismantle the rubble is low due to constant shelling and bombing of the city.” The number of dead left by the bombing is at this point unknown.

The attacks on the the hospital and theater in Mariupol comes only a few days after a maternity hospital was shelled by Russian forces, killing four people, including a six-year-old girl and a pregnant mother and her unborn baby.  

Over the weekend, the Russian army shelled the Mosque of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in Mariupol where 86 Turkish Muslims including 34 children were sheltering.  It is unknown how many casualties there are in the mosque.  Russian forces have stymied attempts to bring in food and water and evacuate the Turkish civilians trapped in the mosque.  The office of the mayor of Mariupol reported on Friday that 1,500 people had been killed during the first 12 days the city had been under attack by Russian forces.  Mariupol is a port city on the Black Sea with a population of almost a half-million.  Crews had been digging mass graves and burying the city’s dead, but the ongoing bombardment forced the city to stop digging the trenches, the mayor reported.

The World Health Organization has reported that at least two dozen hospitals and other medical facilities in Ukraine have come under Russian fire in the last three weeks.  But holding an entire hospital and hundreds of civilians hostage and using them as human shields is a brand new level of war crime in this or any other war I can think of with the exception of the slaughter that took place in 1975 in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge forced the evacuation of more than 2 million people from Phnom Penh, including 15,000 to 20,000 patients who were removed from hospitals and put on a forced march out of the city.

More than 20,000 citizens of Phnom Penh died on the forced march and more were killed or starved to death on rural farm collectives where they were forced to work. But not even the Khmer Rouge used hospital patients as human shields in its war against the right-wing government of Lon Nol.

The Russian army began its assault on Ukraine by shelling and rocketing civilian areas of the cities of Kharkiv and Mariupol.  Now they are shelling apartment buildings and civilian neighborhoods in Kyiv using artillery and short-range ballistic missiles. As Russian forces have faced increased resistance from the Ukrainian military, they have stepped up their attacks and resorted to illegal measures like taking hostages and using civilians as human shields.  The talking heads on TV should immediately retire the word “indiscriminately” from the vocabulary they use to describe Russian shelling.  The Russians are picking their targets and using guided munitions and targeting buildings marked clearly as shelters for civilians, making the bombing criminally discriminate.

Asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin at an event in the White House this afternoon, President Biden answered with this: “He is a war criminal.”  What Putin thought would be an easy defeat of a weak army and a swift take-over of an allegedly corrupt state has turned into an ongoing and brutal crime against humanity.