War as an impersonal phenomenon doesn't bring anything inherently, saying so simply blurs individual responsibility. It's up to the belligerents, up to the individual commanders, units and members of armed forces to decide what and whom they target. Targetting a dam by the Russians is a war crime per Art. 56 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.
Is Russia the kind of country that would kill you or members of your family if you were in uniform and didn't follow orders? I honestly don't know. I do think individual responsibility absolutely has a place for acts in war, but I'd want that informed by that what choices those individuals had available and what they'd have understood the consequences of their choices would be.
Of course they are, they've done it the whole war.
Most of the time executing civilian men as per our gender's supposed "main purpose" in life.
But they have also executed women and children indiscriminately as well. There are recorded radio conversations of Russian soldiers explaining their orders as "kill everyone, I don't care who they are".
It's also weird how totally unnecessary all of this is. You could probably say that about most wars really, but this one is entirely pointless. Russia didn't have to invade at all. They can go home at any time and it'd all just stop. It'll be hard enough to deal with all the loss and damage that's been done already.
Russia’s image was trashed when they failed to take Ukraine in the first weeks of the invasion. Winning now (or months/years from now) isn't going to fix that. Even if they did win what would they get? Russia has no real need for Ukraine. I'd rather be known as a country who screwed up but knows when to quit than one who does something dumb and is too embarrassed by it to pull their head out of their own ass no matter what the cost.
This type of view pretends to be smart, but only until you personally get robbed or mistreated. Then such people quickly learn that sometimes there's black and white. Seen many times.
You only can afford to not think in black and white until you're confronted with, as you write, evil and good, yourself.
As per one of Ekaterina Schulmann's recent talks (I think the one at Science Po) "Q: Do you know which concentration camp they are bringing us to? A: I don't know, I don't bother about politics!"
Vladimir Vladimirovich is going to be remembered as the next Adolf Stalin and for a good reason. Post-1945 world is not magically immune to the emergence of such people in power. Grey morality, especially with regards to genocidal dictators, is a myth that the West fell into because Germany had to be quickly whitewashed into being a NATO ally. Hence the "clean Wehrmacht" myth, the Rommel myth, and more. Now this cognitive distortion plays out with regards to Russia and their crimes, "oh they can't be completely evil, nobody can be completely evil anymore", when that is just a myth. Sometimes we can see the same distortion with regards to China, too.
