by O. Del Fabbro
Of 969 days in captivity, Stanislav Aseyev spent 875 days in complete isolation in a modern concentration camp in Russian occupied Donetsk. In his memoir, The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Aseyev aims to write about this personal experience.[1]
Torture is, according to Aseyev, a complex system of measures. The goal is not necessarily to hurt the victim physically, but to destroy their individuality. Indeed, Aseyev is victim to a mixture of physical and psychological torture, simply because body and mind cannot be separated from one another. After electrical shocks, or beatings with the PR-73 (a standard Soviet-police rubber baton), Aseyev’s tormentors ask him seemingly weird questions such as his belief in God, if he’s ever jumped with a parachute and how many times he masturbates per day. Every once in a while, he is asked questions about his actual charges: espionage. The goal, of course, is to disorient the victim, to potentially make him lie only to be able to punish him even more. Aseyev is released from prison in December 2019.
Even though Aseyev speaks only about his personal experience, his case is one of many. It is representative for Russia’s cruel warfare against Ukraine, the terror that started even before the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Ever since, we have seen the mass graves in Bucha, have watched videos of the mercenary Wagner Group executing its own members with a sledgehammer, read about the castration of an Ukrainian POW by Russian soldiers and the sexual abuse and rape of women and men, children and elderly. We witnessed how thousands of Ukrainian children were shipped to Russian territory and indoctrinated with Russian propaganda.
Russian cruelty seems to dwell from an endless well, even affecting nature, that is the biodiversity of ecosystems, as the explosion of the Kakhovka Dam has shown. These examples might be singular events, but taken together, they show the systematic cruelty hiding behind Russian warfare. Lastly, Russians are not just cruel to their enemy, they are also active within their own ranks, for example when Russian soldiers executed their comrades, who were fleeing from the frontline.
The intriguing fact about those cruelties is not solely that they occurred, creating tremendous suffering and pain; but also, that they are promoted by the Russian media. From the Russian point of view, it is the Ukrainians that need to be punished and disciplined, justifying thereby every single form of brutality. In any case, Russians are the supreme nation, and it’s the Ukrainians who are the Nazis and barbarians. According to the Kremlin Bucha is a monstrous forgery.
For the sake of justifying cruel actions, Russians are not the first to come up with such confusing narratives, unnecessarily complexifying the situation. But luckily, such complexity can be easily disenchanted, by following Judith Shklar’s dictum of putting cruelty first.[2] Instead of coming up with virtuous and ethical positive constructs, Shklar proposes to proceed negatively, by highlighting cruel actions. Similarly to Shklar, Michael Hampe wrote that in war violence should never turn into cruelty.[3] War is violent, indeed, and painful and tough, yes, but it should not become cruel. Hampe’s conceptual distinction is something like a qualitative indicator, giving an indication as to when the threshold from violence to cruelty has been surpassed. But again, that threshold can only be grasped, if one points at cruel actions, and if one sees where violence turns into excessive violence, that is, cruelty.
Cruelty thus means to use violence not as a means, but as an end, so that, ultimately, violence is not kept in check but continuously expanded, with perpetrators becoming ever more creative in how to make their victims suffer, for the sake of making them suffer. The goal of culturally and existentially annihilating an opponent, to make him suffer unnecessary pain, simply for the sake of one’s own pleasure or ideology, is nothing else than cruelty. Russian warfare in Ukraine is a war in which violent means become cruel because violence itself is celebrated, justified and affirmed. Violence ceased to be a means, for the Russians it is an end. For Russia there are no reasonable political aims to conduct this war, there never have been and probably never will be. Its political goal is at best colonial occupation, denial of any Ukrainian sovereignty and cultural identity. Russian warfare is thus not only barbaric, it is also far from any enlightened form, and lacks the slightest respect and tolerance for the opposing party, civilians, children, including international humanitarian law and so on.
Ukraine’s goal in this war, that is its strategy, is clear and always has been: regain sovereignty over the lost territories since 2014, rebuild its society and economy, join NATO and the EU, and make sure that the Russians are held responsible for their war crimes. The Ukrainians are fighting the fight of their life, not only because they struggle for national and cultural survival, but also because they are opposed to an enemy who is relentlessly cruel. For in the light of constantly experiencing cruelties, the most difficult thing to do is to not answer with cruelty. As barbaric and as cruel as the enemy therefore might be, his actions can always be countered, with patience and clear-sightedness, without losing one’s dignity, self-respect and respect for the enemy, but nevertheless with utter hardness and harsh severeness.
When I asked Vitalii, a twenty-five-year-old Ukrainian veteran, who lost a limb in the trenches of Kharkiv in August 2022, what he thinks about the fact that Russians are calling Ukrainians “Nazis”, he answered simply: “The best way to recognize Nazis is to point at their actions. The Russians are killing and torturing people.” In this sense, Vitalii is arguing no different than Shklar or Hampe. It’s the cruel actions of the Russians that speak for themselves in this war, it’s their chosen form of cruel warfare. That is why voices by Aseyev, and other victims of cruelty are important to record and listen to. Vitalii concludes: “The best way is to win the war as quick as possible.” Only then will the suffering of innocent Ukrainians stop, and only then, hopefully, will the perpetrators be brought to justice.
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[1] Stanislav Aseyev, 2023, The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, translated by Zenia Tompkins and Nina Murray, Cambridge.
[2] Judith N. Shklar, 1984, Ordinary Vices, Cambridge/London.
[3] Michael Hampe, 2018, Die Dritte Aufklärung, Berlin.