Russia's brutality in Aleppo reflects Moscow’s perspective on warfighting, its military capabilities, and its sense of threat.
Russia’s heavy-handed conduct in the escalating conflict in Syria is a humanitarian disaster; maybe even a war crime. But it also sheds light on Moscow’s perspective on warfighting, its military capabilities, and its sense of threat. What to the West is a troubling regional conflict is, when seen from the Kremlin, a critical battle in a global conflict of existential significance.
The old ultraviolence
The approach Moscow and Damascus have taken to seizing eastern Aleppo in particular has horrified a West which has long held a view of war in which civilian casualties ought to be avoided at best, minimised at worst. The shock is not so much that the Russians are not making any efforts at sparing the innocent, but rather that they seem to be going out of their way to spread hardship, misery and mayhem, targeting aid convoys, hospitalsand other basics of survival.