NY Post Editorial Board: Putin’s Way of War Is Utter Depravity

Soon after Vladimir Putin’s forces leveled that Kyiv theater clearly labeled “children,” word came over social media from victims of Putin’s 2016 bombings in Syria’s civil war: Never do that, Russia targets anything with a humanitarian sign.

Such is Putin’s way of war: bombing shelters and hospitals and generally targeting civilians.

Days afterward, desperate Kyivans are still digging out, hoping to rescue the 1,300 or so who’d sheltered in the basement.

This follows the March 9 shelling of a maternity hospital in besieged Mariupol, leaving it “literally destroyed,” as regional Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko put it. The attack wounded at least 17, including women in labor, and trapped more beneath the rubble.

One now-infamous image from the scene shows emergency personnel carrying out a heavily pregnant and bleeding woman on a stretcher.

Rushed to another hospital, the mom and her baby died last weekend. Her pelvis had been crushed and her hip detached; the baby was delivered via cesarean “but showed no signs of life,” the surgeon wept.

Schools, apartments, hospitals: Putin is leveling them all. Even when his forces don’t outright target them, they bomb and shell indiscriminately, with zero regard for loss of innocent life. In just one example, video shows at least eight unguided aerial bombs hitting civilians in Chernihiv in the north, killing at least 47.

Terror and destruction is the point, as it was in Syria and Chechnya in his prior wars.

Heck, Mariupol’s wasn’t even the first maternity hospital Russia attacked in this oh-so-“special military operation.” That would be the one in Zhytomyr, shelled on March 3. (It’s a tradition: Back in 1999, Moscow bombed a maternity hospital in Grozny, Chechnya, killing 27, mostly mothers and newborns.)

As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said of the Mariupol hospital attack: “People, children are under the wreckage. Atrocity!” Tweeting footage of the ruins, he asked: “How much longer will the world be an accomplice ignoring terror? Close the sky right now! Stop the killings! You have power but you seem to be losing humanity.”

The video he shared during his address to Congress was full of more horrors.

On March 5, the World Health Organization said it had “published six verified reports of attacks on health care in Ukraine. More reports are being verified.”

Then there’s Putin’s use of “humanitarian corridors” as mousetraps. Sometimes his forces honor the pledge to let civilians evacuate the cities he’s besieging; other times, the Russians wait ’til the trap is packed, then start blasting away. It’s gotten to the point where people simply flee through “unofficial” corridors because the risks are better.

“Russia committed a huge crime,” said a regional police official, Volodymir Nikulin, of one such trap. “It is a war crime without any justification.”

And when an approved corridor does prove safe, it’s one that leads to Russia or Belarus, so Russia can film Ukrainians fleeing their own country into Putin’s grasp.

“It’s bulls–t,” Solomiia Bobrovska, an MP with Ukraine’s opposition Holos party involved in humanitarian issues, told the Financial Times. “Nobody wants to evacuate” to enemy territory.

More than 3 million have already fled across Ukraine’s western borders, and many others into the nation’s relatively safe western regions (though Lviv is getting bombed now, too). Putin seems certain to produce at least 10 million refugees before he’s done — and more if he “wins.”

President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week both admitted they “personally” deem Putin a war criminal (though they’re still working with him, and even granting him favors, to get a new Iran deal). But he’s been one for decades: It’s just harder to ignore now, because Russia finally can’t stop the photographic evidence from flowing out.

Between intentional famines and mass purges, Putin’s great idol Joseph Stalin racked up a death toll of perhaps 20 million civilians, including countless Ukrainians starved to death. If he isn’t stopped, Vlad may yet top his hero.