From the wars in Chechnya to Syria, Vladimir Putin has witnessed military campaigns that have caused enormous and often indiscriminate damage to civilian infrastructure, raising fears that he may repeat tactics in Ukraine, observers say.
With his latest invasion, which Western authorities say is slower than expected, they see him increasingly turning to the use of artillery and missile strikes, which, if continued, will devastate residential areas.
Putin’s more than 20-year career at the top of Russian politics is based on his ruthlessness in military affairs.
In 1999, he was a surprise nominee for prime minister by then-sick President Boris Yeltsin, whose popularity was undermined by the country’s economic problems, corruption and bloody separatist war in the Chechen region.
One of Putin’s first major actions as prime minister was to observe a large-scale offensive against insurgents in the breakaway Muslim-majority region in the far southeast.
Although he denied that a ground invasion was being prepared, tens of thousands of troops were deployed in Chechnya along with air and artillery bombardment, which turned the capital, Grozny, into ruins.
“Putin acted like a political kamikaze, throwing all his political capital into the war, burning it to the ground,” Yeltsin later wrote in his memoirs.
Grozny, already damaged during the so-called First Chechen War of 1994-96, has been described by the UN as the world’s most devastated city since the second conflict in 1999.
But battles reported by state media under tightly controlled conditions have turned Putin from a relative unknown into a favorite in next year’s presidential election.
Syrian action
Following the 2008 invasion of neighboring Georgia, in which Russian troops easily overpowered their ill-equipped rivals, Putin ordered Russian troops to enter Syria in 2015 in support of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
This move, which surprised the West, showed that Russian warplanes played a central role in the bombings against the rebels who ravaged Syrian cities, especially during the siege of Aleppo in 2016.
“Aleppo is now synonymous with hell,” then-UN chief Ban Ki-moon said in December of that year after a blockade captured tens of thousands in the city, which was hit by artillery and air strikes.
Charles Lister, an expert on the Syrian conflict at the Middle East Institute, wrote on Twitter this week that the photos of the shelling of the Ukrainian city of Kharkov were “like Aleppo in the first place.”
Eli Tenembaum, a security expert at the French Institute of International Affairs (IFRI), said Putin had in fact initially tried various tactics in Ukraine.
Apparently expecting little resistance, air special forces landed near Kyiv last week in a “thunder escape” attempt to overthrow the government, but were quickly killed or captured.
“It doesn’t work.” “They have faced too much resistance, so what we are seeing now is a return to basics,” Tenembaum told AFP.
“Their main firepower is unmanageable ammunition, which risks devastating Ukrainian forces while causing a very, very large number of civilian casualties, which will increase the displacement (of refugees),” he added.
Images coming from the country of Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv, the southern port of Kherson and the suburbs of Kyiv, show damage to apartment buildings, schools, university buildings or government offices.
We believe that the cruise missile exploded in the central square in Kharkov on Tuesday.
“I don’t see how Putin can come down with dignity,” warned Elliott A. Cohen, a security analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. “It will continue to double, which will mean more destruction and suffering.
Military crimes?
Critics of the Russian leader have long warned that he was encouraged by previous operations, which have remained undisputed.
Russian chess master and oppositionist Gary Kasparov told Times Radio in London this week that “industrial war crimes” are “nothing new” for Putin.
The 69-year-old leader called Russia’s invasion a “special military operation” and said it was justified in defending Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine and “denazifying” the country, which he claims is under far-right control.
Human rights groups such as Amnesty International, as well as online investigators who collect videos filmed on the spot, have begun defending evidence that they hope will one day lead to prosecution.
Amnesty said it “documented the escalation of violations of humanitarian and human rights, including the deaths of civilians as a result of indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas and infrastructure”.
AFP reports