“Our armed forces don’t bomb cities. Everyone is well aware of this.”
— Maria V. Zakharova, a spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry
I awoke this morning and, as so many of you, immediately began to scan the latest from the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The first thing that caught my horrified eye was the utter destruction of a theatre in Mariupol, whose basement had sheltered over 1,000 people, most of them children and women.
Satellite images taken days before the attack showed the word for ‘CHILDREN,’ in Russian, painted in huge letters on either side of the large building. This was clearly a deliberate attack. There is simply no way the Russians could have mistaken this for a legitimate military target. And that, my friends, constitutes a war crime.
Then my eyes fell upon the quote from the beneath-all-contempt Ms. Zakharova, shared at the top of this post.
An astonishingly bald-faced lie.
Shaking my head in disgust, I took a sip of tea and turned to Al Jazeera’s website, where I came upon this AP Press photo, courtesy of Pavel Dorogoy, showing a scene from downtown Kharkiv.
Then it was on to Human Rights Watch, who have confirmed that Russian forces fired cluster munitions into residential districts in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv on March 7, 11, and 13. The attacks “might amount to war crimes, HRW says.
So Ms. Zakharova — and by extension, your thugish, murderous boss — yes, in fact, Russian forces do bomb cities. Every day. Mercilessly, apparently without remorse.
And everyone — at least everyone with access to objective information — is well aware of this.