"The allegations about civilian massacres are not only fueling outrage. They are also adding to a widespread determination to concede nothing to Russia in any peace talks, and to wage war until all Russian forces have been expelled from the country, including from Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. And from Moscow’s breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where the Ukrainians and Russians have been fighting for eight years.
That view is also expressed by ethnic Russians who have fled predominantly Russian-speaking towns in east and southeast Ukraine. Russian soldiers were told by their officers at the outset of the invasion that they would be greeted as heroes. Instead, they’ve been met with civilian protests and surliness, to their apparent surprise. Widespread looting and stealing by Russian soldiers has added to the anger of locals, with some saying it is a tactic of thuggish terror aimed at breaking their will and others suspecting it is plain hooliganism by ill-disciplined troops."
This is a strange article. It says some of the "quiet parts" out loud, but I don't know if that's intentional.
It centers around a American (retired) military expert who is fighting on behalf of the Ukrainians:
The 35-year-old Iowan, who did tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, is one of hundreds of foreign volunteers who enlisted with Ukraine’s foreign legion immediately after Russia invaded. He says he did so to “support democracy.” ... O’Leary was in combat for a month without much pause;
It describes other professionally trained Americans slaughtering Russian "kids":
O’Leary does express some professional pity at the hopelessness of some of the Russian conscripts he’s been fighting. “They don’t know what they are doing,” he says. “Some of them are just kids and they have only been training for a few months. You can’t teach anybody anything in that short time. Our sniper, another American, shot one guy in the chest. He dropped and bled out. Another Russian tried to grab his gear. We shot him. The next day they took over a building about 200 meters from us and started shooting and we shot back with a rocket targeting the top story, and they all started running from the building. It was a turkey shoot. We just unloaded on them.
And it strongly hints that the Americans are committing war crimes of their own:
“We captured seven Russian soldiers that were left behind; they were hiding in a golf course. I don’t know what happened to them,” he says.
What are the limits to America's role in this war again? We don't directly pay the people who are shooting the Russians, instead we just train them and supply them with weapons and (presumably) continue paying them a pension? Of course this doesn't excuse the Russian invasion, but it seems like it goes quite a way to explaining why the Russians might feel the Americans are the enemies here.
I read the article as strongly implying that individual Americans are complicit in war crimes in Ukraine, at least to the extent of not reporting them. It's possible the article is wrong or misleading, or that the source mislead the journalist, but after the clear descriptions of Americans killing Russians on the battlefield I read "I don’t know what happened to them" to be a intentional strong wink that the captured Russians were not treated in accordance with the Geneva conventions. Do you interpret it literally?
"The allegations about civilian massacres are not only fueling outrage. They are also adding to a widespread determination to concede nothing to Russia in any peace talks, and to wage war until all Russian forces have been expelled from the country, including from Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. And from Moscow’s breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where the Ukrainians and Russians have been fighting for eight years.
That view is also expressed by ethnic Russians who have fled predominantly Russian-speaking towns in east and southeast Ukraine. Russian soldiers were told by their officers at the outset of the invasion that they would be greeted as heroes. Instead, they’ve been met with civilian protests and surliness, to their apparent surprise. Widespread looting and stealing by Russian soldiers has added to the anger of locals, with some saying it is a tactic of thuggish terror aimed at breaking their will and others suspecting it is plain hooliganism by ill-disciplined troops."