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People worldwide have been shocked by gruesome images of corpses strewn in the streets of Bucha, Ukraine, as Russian forces pulled back in recent days, but foreign policy experts say the brutal tactics the Kremlin is using are nothing new.
“It is absolutely not an accident that they are fighting this way,” Rebekah Koffler, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and author of “Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America,” told Fox News Digital.
“This is 100% intentional. It’s not a lack of military discipline.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy detailed the alleged atrocities in a speech to the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday after visiting Bucha, saying that Russian forces “killed entire families, adults and children, and they tried to burn the bodies.”
“Civilians were crushed by tanks while sitting in their cars in the middle of the road, just for their pleasure,” Zelenskyy said. “They cut limbs, slashed their throats, women were raped and killed in front of their children.”
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES BELOW
The atrocities revealed in Ukraine track with past Russian military operations, according to Sean McFate, a U.S. military veteran and professor of strategy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
“In the frustration of the conventional war, [Putin’s] pivoted to more unconventional warfare to achieve his goals, but not the U.S. type of winning hearts and minds. It’s the Russian type, which is the hammer,” McFate told Fox News Digital.
“This is what he did in Grozny in 1999 when he was the new prime minister. It’s what he did in Aleppo,” McFate told Fox News Digital. “This is in their playbook. As shocking as it is, it’s nothing new.”
State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Monday that the U.S. “is seeing credible reports of torture, rape, and civilians executed alongside their families.”
“The images we have seen and reports we have heard suggest these atrocities are not the act of a rogue soldier. They are part of a broader, troubling campaign,” Price said.
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES BELOW
Ukrainian officials said that around 300 civilians were killed in Bucha, a town about 20 miles northwest of Kyiv, but NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned Tuesday of more harrowing scenes if Russian forces pull out of other areas.
“When and if they withdraw the troops and Ukraine’s troops take over, I’m afraid they will see more mass graves, more atrocities, and more examples of war crimes,” Stoltenberg said at a press conference.
EVIDENCE OF RUSSIA’S WAR CRIMES IS ‘DEVASTATING, DISGUSTING, AND SICKENING’: KIRBY
Aside from allegedly targeting civilians, Russian forces also blew up an industrial nitric acid container in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday, sending noxious and harmful fumes into the air, Ukrainian officials said.
“Do not leave bomb shelters. If you are indoors – close windows and doors,” Luhansk region governor Serhiy Haidai wrote on Facebook.
Russia has denied the war crime accusations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the scenes in Bucha a “stage-managed anti-Russian provocation,” while Moscow’s U.N. ambassador Vassily Nebenzia accused the Ukrainians of staging “a crude forgery.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks via remote feed during a meeting of the UN Security Council, Tuesday, April 5, 2022, at United Nations headquarters.
((AP Photo/John Minchillo))
Part of the reason that the West has been so shocked by Russian actions is an intelligence failure called mirror-imaging, in which we process Putin’s invasion through our own lens.
“It’s a cardinal sin of intelligence analysis. It’s basically, you put yourself in Putin’s shoes, but you don’t understand Putin, you’re judging him as we would judge him,” McFate said. “What we think is okay is actually not how they think of the world.”
Koffler echoed that sentiment, saying that it’s erroneous to expect Putin to do the same thing that Americans might do in a given situation.
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“Bottom line is tactically, they’ve displayed a lot of incompetence from the American standpoint, but they have the wrong frame of reference,” Koffler said.
“The fight in Ukraine is to draw the red line for NATO membership, but also to demonstrate to the other post-Soviet states who might be thinking about this type of switch that severe costs will be imposed on them.”
Fox News’s Gillian Turner and Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.
