Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov justified the Palm Sunday massacre in the Ukrainian city of Sumi (which left thirty-four civilians dead and more than a hundred injured) by arguing that the building attacked with two Russian missiles was holding a secret meeting of Ukrainian and Western military personnel. "Ukrainian military leaders and their Western colleagues, posing as mercenaries or who knows what," Lavrov described. He added: "There are military personnel from NATO countries in charge there, everyone knows that."
Citing the deployment of alleged military or terrorist installations on civilian infrastructure to justify attacks against these civilian targets has become a custom of modern-day warfare. So too is that other argument that the enemy "uses civilians as human shields." In reality, these are nothing more than excuses to fire indiscriminately at the population of the attacked location, thus causing maximum pain and exhaustion (and, consequently, feelings of anger, rage, and helplessness among the victims, with all the burden of conflict and social disintegration) within the opposing side. These excuses are never proven or verified, and are increasingly served routinely, coldly, and half-heartedly, as mere formalities. This is what Russia does in its war against Ukraine (which for months they refused to recognize as a war, but rather as a "special military operation"), and so does Israel in the genocide it perpetrates against the population of Gaza (which, according to Netanyahu and his government, is also not a genocide, but a response to Hamas attacks). After all, this is state terrorism, committed by the respective armed forces. Soldiers turned into butchers of the helpless, the most repulsive and reprehensible type of murderers.
The protection of civilians (and prisoners, and wounded soldiers or those not participating in armed maneuvers, etc.) is enshrined in the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the definition of war crimes is that established by the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, mandated by the UN Security Council, as in the cases of Rwanda or the Balkan wars. However, the slowness of these judicial processes, the limitations that the courts and the International Criminal Court often encounter, and the lack of mechanisms to enforce the Conventions are the cracks through which criminal rulers like Putin, Lavrov, Netanyahu, and their ultra-Orthodox and extreme associates pass their atrocities, committed in the name of any lofty ideal. These are rulers who hold elections to give themselves a veneer of nonexistent democratic credibility, while continually violating international humanitarian law. And they offend, with their cynical excuses, the intelligence of the entire world.
