Buildings of Children’s hospital Okhmatdyt in Kyiv after Russian Missiles attack on Ukraine, July 8, 2024. By Dsns.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=150134738
For almost two and a half years, Russian attacks on the Ukrainian population and civilian infrastructure have never ceased. But on Monday July 8, several attacks by some forty Russian missiles, causing more than 40 civilian deaths and hundreds of injuries, provoked particular indignation.
One of the targets was the Okhmatdyt pediatric hospital, one of the largest and most modern in Europe. Five of its buildings were meant to be hit, not to mention a number of residential buildings where the death toll is highest. A private clinic in Kyiv was also hit, as was a hospital in Dnipro. In addition to the many victims killed or injured—children and their mothers who were staying with them, carers, etc.—the scenes are appalling. Children being treated for cancer and deprived of their protective sanitary bubbles were thrown into the street. The intentional nature of the target has been, as is usually the case, perfectly documented, despite the Kremlin’s denials, which add abjection to the crime against humanity.
This is not the first time—the attack on the Marioupol maternity hospital comes to mind. On April 4, the WHO counted 1,682 attacks on hospitals and health centers by the Russians since the start of their all-out war. The Russians and the Assad regime had already experimented with this in Syria, attacking 400 health centers. We recall in particular the main hospital in Aleppo featured in the final scenes of Waad Al-Kateab's indispensable and deeply moving film For Sama. Moscow had already experimented with this “technique” in Chechnya.
The fact that Kyiv, where more than 30 people were killed and which is usually better protected, was hit also shows the lack of spare missiles for air defense, which is even more acute elsewhere in the country. Here, too, we know: decisions to deliver missile defense systems, notably the Patriot, were ignominiously late, and at the NATO summit in Washington, the delivery of just one unplanned system was announced, all the others having been scheduled earlier. Earlier decisions could have saved thousands of lives.
Only recently have some of the Allies, including France, given Ukraine conditional permission to strike the Russian territory from which these missiles originate—or the airbases from which Russian bombers take off or the aircraft themselves—with the long-range missiles they have supplied. But there are still many restrictions, particularly on the part of Washington, which maintains its overall refusal—with rare exceptions (forces stationed in Russia near Kharkiv). These missiles are also delivered in too small numbers, and certain countries, notably Germany with its Taurus, still refuse to supply them. Not giving Ukraine all the means to retaliate is tantamount to giving Moscow a license to kill, including children with cancer or on dialysis. Thousands of civilians can continue to be murdered without most of the Allies finding fault.
This indignation without strategy is like the symbol of a world which is dying out and which, after almost two and a half years of total war and ten and a half years of war against Ukraine, still hasn’t understood the things that really matter.
Russian crimes: signifier and signified
It’s appropriate to return to a question that is as simple as it is decisive, and which some people have been asking me at the conferences I’ve been giving since the publication of my latest book, Notre Guerre (Our War). Crime and Oblivion. Why, they ask, is the Kremlin so relentless in its attacks on civilians? I invariably reply that war crimes and crimes against humanity are in the very nature of Moscow’s war against Kyiv. Having developed this idea, I add that this is precisely what most of the Allies either don’t understand, or—and this is much more serious—refuse to grasp, for fear of measuring the necessary implications in terms of foreign policy.
First of all, by definition, Russia’s terrorist acts are designed to terrorize, in the hope of making populations bend and prefer the yoke to death. The Ukrainian population, as I have seen on the five occasions I have visited Ukraine since the start of the total war, will not give in. This is existential for them, because until Russia is totally defeated, Russian terrorist acts will not cease, whatever their nature. They signify a desire for extermination and a form of pleasure in murder that can meet no limit other than the technical possibility for Moscow to commit them.
This Russian relentlessness is intended to show all Russia's dictator friends that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide can be committed with impunity. It’s all part of Putin’s destruction of the international standards set at Nuremberg. Despite several indictments by the International Criminal Court, including of Putin himself, our feeble response tragically proves him right. The meaning here is impunity for crime. The Kremlin is also sending a message to its political allies in Western countries who share its contempt for the rule of law. Russian fascism speaks to Western fascists.
Finally, Russia’s ultimate goal remains the annihilation, if not the subjugation, of the Ukrainian people. This goes beyond a strategy of extermination by murderous madness. It corresponds to a duly planned and documented genocidal project. To target a children’s hospital is to announce that you want to destroy the future of the Ukrainian nation. It is to say that it must become a country without children—those whom Russia fails to deport en masse and assimilate into Russian families, where they are supposed to lose their place in the history of their country, will have to be killed. The crime against children is, in itself, a genocidal message, just as the deportation of children constitutes a crime of genocide under the Convention of December 9, 1948.
Certain so-called strong minds, the pseudo-realists, to use Raymond Aron’s expression, which has already been mentioned here, ironize our indignation. They would like to consider war without recognizing its specificity, as made explicit by Russian crimes. Yet not only are our principles and values, as Aron also wrote, part of our interests, but such crimes constitute the syntax of this war. When a regime has been committing such crimes without statute of limitation for 24 years, turning a blind eye to the martyred children is also a strategic error, and not just a moral one. It prevents us from seeing that these atrocities are first and foremost a threat to our own security. It eliminates the reality of total war from our horizon. It deprives us of any understanding of the reality of the Russian regime. It makes us desillusional, as we see in the words of those who still dare to speak of possible negotiations or a peace agreement. Finally, it prevents us from grasping what forgetting Nuremberg means for us too.
Hospital In Vilniank (Zaporizhzhoa region in Ukraine) after Russian strike in the night, November 23, 2022. A two-storey building of the polyclinic maternity ward was destroyed. By Zoda.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125949250
Forgetting Nuremberg
Certainly, as I wrote four days after the start of the Russian total war, some form of Nuremberg tribunal will be needed to punish all Russian leaders, sponsors and state propagandists. Likewise, specific tribunals will have to be set up to judge all the lower-level war criminals and criminals against humanity. An appropriate judicial architecture will have to be found—since the ICC will not be able to judge all crimes—in the sense of a security architecture. The former will have to be part of the latter.
However, to speak of Nuremberg goes far beyond the judgment and essential impunity of Russian leaders and executors. To talk about Nuremberg is to return to a forgotten foundation. It means understanding that it is the vital link with the shared history of the bloody 20th century which, lost or turned into a purely memorial invocation despite Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sudan in particular, and the judgments handed down, has been the primary driving force behind our strategic blindness. To return to Nuremberg is not only to proclaim the need for international criminal justice, which no one can pretend to abolish, it is also to understand the causes of certain contemporary wars, of which the Russian war against the Ukraine is today’s most accomplished example of an enterprise for the total destruction of a people. It also means grasping the ideological dimension of a war that cannot be reduced to any geopolitical narrative.
Of course, we could go on endlessly about the anthropology of crime, the psychology of criminals and the sociological dimension that goes some way to explaining it. In fact, we should certainly continue to tackle them with seriousness and precision. It’s always an ideological, anthropological, psychological, social and political complex, interwoven with each other, that explains how a people, whatever it may be, finds itself at some point in a situation where it can commit mass crimes, spurred on by its leaders. Cultural, social and even religious brakes are always too fragile and therefore ephemeral. Legal and political dikes can be breached anywhere. But to pretend to consider the subject of war without, in cases like this, grasping the dimension of absolute crime, is to remain blind to its solutions.
If the self-proclaimed strategists and analysts of international relations so frequently turn away from it, it’s certainly out of convenience. But it’s also due to a lack of culture, and even more so to a refusal to consider the specific nature of war when it takes the form of a war of extermination. Forgetting Nuremberg leads to the essentialization of “war” as if it were a uniform phenomenon that could be placed in a unified category. Ignoring Nuremberg shifts the focus of fear to a generalized conflagration which, in the present case, has been refuted time and again, when it should be on the immensity of the crime.
Thinking in the shadow of Nuremberg is therefore first and foremost a step towards lucidity in the face of the Russian enterprise. It means building a strategy towards Russia that I have often pointed out here does not exist either in Washington or in most European capitals, particularly in Western Europe. In this case, of course, it means understanding that there can be no peace with Russia unless it is completely defeated. This poor strategy not only puts an end to the principles of the Enlightenment, and thus threatens democracies from within, but also gives the revisionist powers a decisive advantage in their well-organized strategy of destroying all rules and safeguards. It means preparing for a world that is simultaneously darker and more threatening.
Emotion without strategy: empty political speech
I was talking about emotion. It was certainly real for a large part of the public. Most of the world’s political leaders expressed their indignation and condemnation in more or less forceful terms. But as is almost always the case, this was not translated into concrete action. As always, vain words, repeated almost mechanically and prepared by advisors and diplomatic chancelleries, end up being more indecent than silence and contemplation. Emotion without strategy remains the zero degree of politics. Emotion without action is volatile and insubstantial. It is the real name for indifference and exit.
In the end, this is the best reflection of the half-hearted resolve of most democratic countries. We continue to keep total war at bay. We pretend to manage it with limited means. Fortunately, we're talking more and more about the Russian threat and the need for “solidarity” with the Ukrainian people, but this remains a way of keeping ourselves out of the war. Of course, you might say, not completely, since Western countries are supplying arms, reinforcing their security and continuing to “prevent Ukraine from losing”, according to the formula regularly used, with a few variations. But this is not the full extent of the war.
To do just that, we’d have to talk every day of the week about Russia’s mass crimes in the Ukraine. These crimes would have to enter our kitchens, disturb our daily lives, even upset the tranquility of our vacations and celebrations. Crime should be somehow familiar in its horror, permeating our souls and disturbing our nights. Instead, these same political leaders keep it at a distance, as if on the edge of our lives. Nor do these mass crimes keep them awake at night, as if oblivious to their duty of state.
Speaking and acting as if crime were neither at the heart of the war, nor of their thoughts, still less of their strategy, they prevent public opinion from understanding what is at stake with the Russian war against Ukraine. They do not allow us to see that this is the decisive war, the outcome of which will determine the coming decades, the fate of freedom and the future of our security, nor to understand the absolute necessity, at some point in the near future, of intervention if we do not want an even more intense war to be brought to us.
Turning away from crime is the first sign of irresponsibility. Unleadership is the infallible recipe for the dark ages.