Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act – S.C. 2000, c. 24
Russia’s totally unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and subsequent atrocities committed against that country, including the deliberate bombing of civilian targets causing the complete destruction of towns and villages and thousands of deaths among the Ukrainian population brings to mind earlier attempts to bring a country to its knees by targeting its civilian population.
Likely the most devastating example of this tactic was the detonation of two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 by the US that killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people – most of whom were civilians. It led to the almost immediate surrender of the Empire of Japan on 15 August and formally signed on 2 September 1945, bringing the war’s hostilities in that region to a close.
Earlier that year a nearly equally abhorrent example occurred in Europe towards the very end of WW2 in February of 1945, when the capital of the German state of Saxony Dresden was firebombed during a series of joint British and American aerial attacks and which is believed to have caused the death of as many as 25,000 citizens. Exact accounts vary as it is likely many thousand more perished in this murderous fire storm, given the influx of undocumented refugees that had fled to Dresden from the Eastern Front, primarily from Silesia and on the run from Stalin and the Red Army. Tragically, most of the victims were women, children, and the elderly.
Looking back at this, I can’t imagine there could ever be a cause that would justify the wholesale slaughter of innocent men, women and children such as happened in WWII in Japan and Nazi Germany – as much as one might see the cessation of hostilities and the termination of a criminal and murderous regime as the justification for this.
But even if we should be able to conceive of circumstances so desperate that a nation fighting for its survival might see itself as having no other options than having to resort to the mass killing of innocent civilians on the opposing side, it is difficult to imagine that the deliberate destruction of Ukrainian cities and towns and the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians can be claimed by Russia to have been committed as a matter of ensuring Russia’s survival as an independent nation.
More likely, the only matter of survival here concerns Mr. Putin’s pathetic and malignant vision of a renewed Soviet empire, once upon a time a sorry assemblage of impoverished neighbouring vassal states held together by sheer terror under the absolute dictatorship of the murderous Joseph Stalin.
And how ridiculous is this: Russia – being a democracy in name only – “liberating” the independent Ukrainian nation from it democratically elected government by putting it under Putin’s governance, when it could only be seen as another step in realizing the extreme and deadly megalomania of the latter’s ambitions.
The conclusion has to be that Putin’s resort to terrorize and murder the Ukrainian civilian population in order to force its government to capitulate. makes the Russian invasion of that country a criminal act of the highest magnitude, and a crime against humanity by any other name.