‘It doesn’t count as a war crime if you had fun’: in the minds of some Russian soldiers

Sweeping away discarded Russian rations, broken glass and broken furniture was a chore. In the four and a half months that Russian troops had occupied a village in eastern Ukraine, the troops had used the local bar as a small outpost, gutting it in the process.

The physical destruction of the Velyka Komyshuvakha watering hole was only part of what the Russians left behind.

In the back room of the bar was a twisted blueprint of the minds of some of the ordinary people who make up the backbone of the Russian military. The soldiers had turned each wall into a handwritten bulletin board with phrases, rhymes, and expletives.

“It doesn’t count as a war crime if you’ve had fun,” read one line, with a smiley face drawn underneath. And in rhyme on the same wall: “With a happy smile I will burn down foreign villages.”

The practice of graffiti covering military positions and occupied homes is not uncommon. For two decades of the United States’ confused counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, portable toilets scattered throughout the constellation of bases have been a focal point of wartime musings. Many scribbles focused on genitalia, specific military units, bad officers, and the desire to go home.

Much of the writing in the bar in Velyka Komyshuvakha took a decidedly different tone. The barely legible scribbles focused on dehumanizing Ukrainians, a grim staple of warfare, and confirmed that the Kremlin wants to wipe out Ukraine and its culture as part of its invasion.

“Behind us the house is on fire – let it burn – one more, one less,” said a sentence on the wall.

“It was terrible,” says Svitlana Mazurenko, one of about 70 current residents of Velyka Komyshuvakha, where about 500 people once lived before many fled. She had read the writings in September, days after the Russians withdrew, and encountered the text again last month when she helped clean up the bar, known to locals simply as The Bar.

The soldiers who turned the back room into a brutal bulletin board of sorts were from the 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division, single-handedly announced when they repeatedly spray-painted the unit’s nickname, the Taman Division, over the bar.

Other Russian or separatist units could also have rotated, given the turnover rate on the battlefield. But written complaints on the walls that they were not withdrawn suggest that a detachment was stationed at the bar uninterruptedly.

The 2nd Guards is a famous unit in the Russian army and was beaten back around Kiev, the capital, by the Ukrainian forces shortly after the start of the invasion in February 2022. September. Now they are in the east, near the city of Kreminna, military analysts said, bracing for a possible attack as part of Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive.

Little is known about the soldiers who manned the bar, which they renamed Bar 100 in black spray paint, possibly because of the Russian ammunition code. A skull and crossbones and the phrase “MAKE WAR NOT PEACE” in English were also painted on the outside.

The writings on the interior suggested that these troops were not demoralized Russian soldiers under the assumption that they were there to “liberate” the people, a term often used in the early days of the war. These troops, at least those who wrote on the wall, seemed to be there to conquer.

“We need the world, preferably everything,” said a wall post. “Disaster or succes!” said another.

During the occupation, Ms. Mazurenko, 56, said about four people were left behind in Velyka Komyshuvakha, about 105 kilometers southeast of Kharkiv and intersected by a small river. Electricity has only just returned to some parts of the village.

Occupying an outpost at war abroad, especially as part of an invading army, is a harrowing, isolating experience. A soldier’s life is often relegated to boredom and moments of pure terror.

In recent wars, US troops have used terms like “waste,” “smoke,” and “greased” to distance themselves from killing, relying on gallows humor as a coping mechanism. Racist slang was also common. The Taliban were ‘the muj’. The Iraqis were ‘hajjis’.

In the bar, the jokes made their way to the walls. But much of the writing tended to kill and destroy, using similar inhuman language.

One soldier wrote: “God will help and we will help Ukrops to meet him”, using an insult (literally “dill” in Russian) to describe Ukrainians. “Mow the Ukrop,” read another line.

This kind of language is often seen in propaganda and, in more recent wars, on social media. Rarely has evidence of it been found as clear as a battlefield artifact.

“We are naturally prejudiced against outsiders,” writes David Livingstone Smith in his book “Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others.” “This prejudice is seized on and manipulated by indoctrination and propaganda to motivate men and women to slaughter each other.”

War tests everyone who participates in violence. Some Ukrainians disparagingly refer to Russians as “Orcs” and have been Ukrainian troops documented murder Russian prisoners in some cases. The international community has accused Russian troops have committed numerous atrocities, including war crimes and other cruel and inhumane acts, especially against civilians.

Last year did the State Bureau of Investigation of Ukraine accused two Russian soldiers of the 2nd Guards, the same unit stationed at the bar, to fire their tank into a working hospital in the northeastern town of Trostyanets in the early months of the war.

“For all questions about Ukraine, there are 2 answers: 1) It didn’t happen. 2) they deserved it. Both are correct,’ said a line on the wall.

Based on the writings, the company or platoon of the Russian soldiers went through “Wind 12”. They also teased each other, as soldiers do, missed “ice cream and vodka” and seemed to hate or just tolerate their Russian bacon rations. The soldiers also carried ammunition that was probably several years older than many of them.

Discarded 7.62mm shell casings around the bar were stamped in 1988 and 1989 at the Klimovsk Specialized Ammunition Plant and the Novosibirsk Cartridge Plant in Russia.

The soldiers of Wind-12 also wanted to go home.

“Winter is near, but withdrawal not yet,” one soldier had scrawled. Another soldier, in a graffiti outrage, called on his colleagues to stop stealing from civilians, a practice common on every front of the war. “Stop [expletive] stealing everything along the way,” he wrote.

Ms Mazurenko said the Russians had lived in most of the houses in the area and stolen from them, destroying them. But they could not steal from hers: it was destroyed by artillery before the Russians entered the village.

Natalia Yermak reporting contributed.