A “history of carnage” carried out so far by the world’s worst dictator, Vladimir Putin

A Tremendous Number of Lives Taken in First Month of War

On April 4, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) announced that the civilian death toll in Ukraine up to that point was At least 1,430 people. In fact, it was announced that the actual number would be much higher.

On April 3, many slaughtered bodies were found in the northern town of Bucha, north of Khiu, from which Russian troops had withdrawn. The mayor of Bucha told Reuters that “more than 300 people were killed. There are reports of similar massacres outside of Bucha, and on April 5, the Ukrainian authorities stated that they had found 410 civilian bodies in the Khiu area.

On the other hand, the southern port city of Mariupol has been surrounded by Russian troops and shelled daily, and on March 28 the city authorities announced that “the death toll is about 5,000.

It is unclear how correct these figures are, but there is no doubt that at least several thousand civilians have been killed in Ukraine.

In addition to civilian casualties, there were also Ukrainian military casualties, but the Ukrainian authorities have kept this information strictly confidential, and it is not known how many people died.

The number of Russian military casualties is also unknown, but it was reported on March 21 by a Russian newspaper website that “about 9,800 people died in the war,” but this was “immediately deleted,” and on March 24 a NATO official stated that “7,000 to 15,000 Russian troops were killed in the war. It is estimated that perhaps 10,000 is close to the actual number.

This is a tremendous number of estimated casualties in the first month of the war, but it is possible that the Ukrainian military may have suffered more than that. Of course, the actual situation is unknown, but even if it is the same level as the Russian army, the death toll is on the order of 10,000.

All of the above figures are precious lives that would have been spared if President Putin had not launched this “shameful invasion. In other words, Putin has already killed more than 10,000 Ukrainians (estimated).

Putin’s History of Killing

But this is not the only “number of people” Putin has “killed. The following is a list of his major murders.

The Second Chechen War

Putin became prime minister in 1999 and immediately launched an invasion of Chechnya. The attack was brutal, with no regard for the collateral damage to the civilian population, and the Russian military continued it for a decade.

Estimates of the number of civilian deaths in the Second Chechen War vary from group to group, with most estimates ranging from 40,000 to 50,000, but the lowest estimate comes from the neutral international human rights organization Amnesty International. International’s survey put the civilian death toll at about 25,000, with another 5,000 missing persons who probably died. In other words, at least 30,000 civilians have been killed.

In addition, a total of more than 10,000 soldiers of the Chechen Independence Party are believed to have been killed in action. In other words, at least more than 40,000 people have been killed in the war ordered by Putin.

Moscow “staged” a series of terrorist attacks.

Putin, who was the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor organization to the former KGB, assumed real power when he was appointed acting prime minister on August 9, 1999, and prime minister on August 16, 1999, but Only half a month later, on August 31, a bomb attack occurred in a shopping mall in central Moscow. Then, in mid-September, a total of five terrorist attacks were carried out in Moscow apartment complexes and other locations in Russia, killing a total of 295 people.

Later, investigations by brave reporters inside and outside the country almost confirmed that these attacks were ordered by the Putin regime to be carried out by the FSB in order to use them as a pretext for invading Chechnya. In other words, in a staged attack, Putin killed 295 innocent civilians, including his Russian compatriots.

Assassination of Opponents

Since the start of the Putin administration, there has been no end to the murders, attempted murders, and suspicious deaths of opposition faction members, politicians, and journalists.

For example, Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent reporter for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, who had sharply pursued Putin’s war crimes, was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment in 2006. In the same year, Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence officer who had defected to the United Kingdom to engage in anti-Putin speech activities, was also assassinated by a radioactive substance.

Former First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, Putin’s biggest rival, was shot dead in Moscow in 2015. Boris Berezovsky, Russia’s largest upstart conglomerate, defected to the United Kingdom in 2001 for fear of his own safety and continued his anti-Putin activities, but died in his home in 2013.

The number of such critics of Putin who have been killed at home and abroad is at least 30. Including those who were not killed but suffered assassination attempts, such as pro-democracy leader Alexei Nawarinuy (2020) and former intelligence officer Sergei Skripali (2018), who suffered an assassination attempt with the military nerve agent Novichok, at least 50 more have been affected.

It should be noted that of these opposition assassinations and assassination attempts, the Nawarinui assassination attempt was an FSB operation, and the Skripali assassination attempt was the work of the military intelligence agency “General Staff Intelligence Directorate” (GRU), according to an investigation by the British private investigation agency Bellingcat. Other assassinations and assassination attempts are also presumed to have been carried out mainly by FSB special teams.

Syria’s atrocities that have caused enormous civilian casualties

Airstrikes in Syria

In the Syrian conflict that began in 2011, the Putin regime vetoed every UN Security Council resolution that put pressure on the Assad regime, which was slaughtering Syrian citizens crying anti-dictatorship, and continued military support for the Assad regime.

In addition, starting in 2015, the government directly dispatched Russian air force units and began indiscriminate airstrikes on rebel areas. Russian forces continued to destroy hospitals, schools, markets, and homes, killing large numbers of civilians. It continues to this day, but Russia consistently claims that it is only attacking terrorists. This is the same thing it is currently doing in Ukraine.

The number of civilians that Russian forces have slaughtered in Syria is at least 8,700 (as of June 2021) according to the NGO Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) and 6,900 (as of February 2022) according to its “Violence Documentation Center” (VDC) The number of people who have been killed or wounded in the war is Incidentally, the VDC puts the total number of killings by Russian forces, including combatants, at 7,360. This proves that while they claim to be “attacking terrorists only,” in reality they are killing only civilians.

And that’s not all. Putin not only commits these direct murders, but also indirectly aids and abets them. As mentioned above, Russia’s burial of the UN Security Council resolution has prolonged the life of the Assad regime and slaughtered many civilians. According to the aforementioned SOHR, the number of those killed is more than 130,000 known, with tens of thousands more unaccounted for. Statistics from the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), another leading NGO, put the figure at over 200,000.

It is no exaggeration to say that Putin killed this huge number of civilian victims as well.

Assassination of “military dummies

Wagner, a private military company under the command of the GRU

There is a private military company that the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency mentioned above, uses as a military dummy when the Russian military is unable to act openly. It is called the Wagner Group, and its owner is a political businessman in Putin’s inner circle with direct ties to the Kremlin.

This Wagner has been dispatched not only to Syria and Ukraine, but also to Libya, Central Africa, South Sudan, Mozambique, Madagascar, and Mali. Wagner often takes on the dirty work, and even in those countries, it is common for him to join the side of a dictatorial power or one of the political forces and take on the task of suppressing local opposition. In the process, they probably kill a good number of local residents, but their activities are kept secret.

Incidentally, in July 2018, three Russian journalists who entered Central Africa to cover Wagner’s activities were shot and killed in transit.

Incidentally, on April 5, the international human rights organization Human Rights Watch released a report stating that ” about 300 civilians were killed in Mali at the end of March by Malian government forces and foreign fighters. There are eyewitness accounts that these foreigners were Russians, possibly Wagner.

…invasion of the Donbass region

Illegal invasions of Ukraine by Russian forces have been ongoing since 2014. At first, they sent troops to the Crimean Peninsula to occupy it. Later, they claimed to have unilaterally annexed it to Russia.

In addition, it used the momentum to unofficially deploy its military and military intelligence agencies into the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine and partially occupied it, with local pro-Russian factions in the forefront. In the course of the subsequent fighting with Ukrainian forces, 14,000 people have already died. Putin is responsible for all these sacrifices as well.

As mentioned above, Putin has been involved in numerous killings long before the current invasion of Ukraine. A rough calculation shows that he is already directly responsible for the killing of around 80,000 people. Add to that the responsibility for the slaughter of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who is effectively under Putin’s control, and Putin is the worst mass murderer of the 21st century, having killed close to 300,000 people .

Putin has been on a killing spree since 1999. Before his recent invasion of Ukraine, he was already in the Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot category.

Buntaro Kuroi: Military journalist, born in 1963. He is the one and only Putin watcher who has been reporting in Moscow and Syria and analyzing Putin’s words and actions for many years.