Two news articles about the gruesome murder of a Syrian man by sadistic members of the Wagner PMC (https://golosislama.com/news.php?id=37549) and (https://golosislama.com/news.php?id=37574) topped the list of most viewed materials on our website for the week, and also became one of the top stories in the Russian-speaking world and received significant attention worldwide.
What is shocking in this case is not only the fact of sadistic torture, murder, and desecration of the victim’s body, which is absolutely horrific. Almost every war involves individuals with a «screw loose» and sadistic tendencies who use it as an opportunity to express themselves. Even when there is no war, the chronicles of crimes in Russia daily report brutal murders not only of enemies, but also of children, family members, former friends, and so on. We cannot pretend that this happens only in Russia, although the country firmly holds its position on the list of third world countries when it comes to domestic and criminal cruelty. Such incidents can happen anywhere and do happen regularly.
The problem lies elsewhere. This sadistic crime, this war crime, was committed by members of a militia group — not a state army, but one sent to this country by the state, as everyone in the country and the world knows. Perhaps not from a legal perspective, but certainly from a moral and reputational perspective.
Now let’s consider a more recent analogy. In the early days of the joint military operation between the Turkish Armed Forces and the Syrian National Army (SNA), members of the latter committed several acts that violated the accepted rules of warfare, which were immediately exploited by the enemy’s propaganda. However, these acts didn’t involve smashing someone’s legs with a sledgehammer on camera, beheading them with a shovel, and then hanging and setting fire to their decapitated and disfigured bodies, as in this case. Rather, it was the shooting of unarmed prisoners in conditions approximating those of combat, when the enemy had just fought but dropped their weapons in the hope of capture and mercy. Killing the enemy in such a situation can be understood as an excess, but such an excess undoubtedly violates the accepted rules of war and the treatment of prisoners. Therefore, almost the next day, the SNA leadership, as well as the Wagner PMC, which is not a recognized regular state army, issued a statement condemning these actions and promising to investigate and punish those responsible. They then issued an internal document instructing their fighters to abide by international rules of warfare.
What do we see in this case? What was the reaction to this monstrous cruelty and equally monstrous stupidity (recorded on camera) of the leaders and talking heads of the state that justified its intervention in Syria as a necessity to fight barbarism and obscurantism, among other things? Grave silence, no outrage, no condemnation, no promises to investigate and punish those who discredited Russian servicemen before the eyes of the world as insane sadists, depicted exactly as they were in a popular video game that caused such outrage in Kremlin propaganda.
Instead, Kremlin and pro-Kremlin propagandists and bots on social media were not silent. They openly and vehemently justified this sadism, arguing that ISIS members are not human beings (the victim, by the way, was not an ISIS member, but a peaceful Syrian fleeing mobilization into Assad’s army) and should be treated in exactly the same way.
The degradation of this system, even compared to its early days, is simply outrageous. It is clear that the same sadists who showed themselves to the world were involved in the atrocities in Chernokozovo, Samashki, Aldi and other Chechen settlements that gave rise to the current regime. It is clear that they were also covered up, and many internally approved of all this. But at least in the most obvious cases where such war crimes were exposed, as in the case of Budanov, the authorities were forced to condemn and even punish the sadists who were caught.
Now, almost twenty years later, we see their shameless apology, which shocks not only civilized countries, but even Alexander Barkashov, the leader of the neo-Nazi organization RNE in the 1990s. He declared that these Wagnerian mercenaries are possessed by demons and do things that contradict military ethics, for which he was smeared by Kremlin bots.
This is the reality of Putin’s Russia at the end of 2019 — a country of deranged sadists who shock not only the civilized world, but also classic Nazis.