Missiles and Drones Light the Sky and a Movie Night of War Crimes
Everywhere the Russian rampage goes, it leaves a trail of war crimes in its wake. Rape, murder, torture and mass destruction.
Kyiv, Ukraine — I had just checked into my sixth-floor hotel room in Kyiv at the top of a spindly stairway in a 19th century Beaux Arts building that had seen better days.
The half-moon sky was almost cloudless as the siren went off and the boom-boom drew me to the window. A half-dozen missiles, maybe more, streaked white trails across the dark sky like runaway freight trains. Ukrainian anti-air defense jumped into action and chased Russian aggression fixed on civilian targets out of the sky.
Boom, boom. I could hear missiles colliding behind the skyline of buildings obscuring their path. A jet-like, white line followed a lumbering triangular Iranian drone. Then, SPLAT. It disappeared.
Just back from traveling around Ukraine’s Kharkiv Oblast, I had become a bit numb to sirens and the long, moaning sound of a bellowing sick farm animal filling the air. Russian missiles flying over the entire oblast regularly trigger the air-raid alerts day and night. Holding onto their sanity, people try to take sirens in stride even as their neighbors are maimed and murdered in falling buildings.
It’s accepted as the new normal with a shrug ever since February 21, 2022 when Russia launched its massive invasion from the north.
News columnists with The New York Times and The Washington Post had recently visited the Kyiv with a group hosted a pro-Ukrainian group, Renew Democracy Initiative, led by Russian chess master and vocal foe of Vladimir putin, Garry Kasparov. It was a week of meet-and-greet between high-level Ukraine officials and a “delegation” of U.S. influencers.
Both writers reported back with similar thoughts after witnessing an especially spectacular show of Russian missiles startling them from their sleep. The Ukrainian air defense recently beefed up with $1.1 billion-Patriot missile systems performed above expectations, they said, and shot down all of Russia’s incoming, including six killer hypersonic Kinzhals that Russia boasted could travel 10 times the speed of sound and were unbeatable. The two writers were impressed and proud of the U.S. Patriot missiles. Russia’s claims were deflated.
The Thrill Was not to be Found
Looking out my window, I searched for the same thrill of victory as these columnists. Strangely, I found the show artful, somewhat like fireworks. Artful and ugly. I returned to bed even before the alarms had ceased. I was confident all the Russian murderous mischief would be thwarted and I was a bit jaded by it all. I, too, recognized the new normal. Western anti-air defense adeptly protects Ukraine’s capital city. Go east and the protection becomes spottier with big holes the Russians exploit.
My travels in the east with a few friends providing humanitarian aid had taken me to the towns and villages occupied by the Russians until last fall when the Ukrainian forces kicked Putin’s army’s ass and pushed them eastward away from Kharkiv and into Luhansk. Pick a town, pick a village, it doesn’t matter. Not a single one has escaped seeing destruction of homes, schools and hospitals. The stories of rape, pillage, murder fall appallingly from almost everyone’s tongue.
Part of my reasoning in getting back to Kyiv was to see a new film about Russia’s war crimes. It was the event of the weekend for most media people living in the busy city and covering “the war.”
Movie Night and War Crimes
The film, now called Under Deadly Skies: Ukraine’s Eastern Front, is produced by a charismatic British journalist, John Sweeney, who teamed up with other accomplished journalists, including famed war photographer Paul Conroy – all well known around town. They usually gather at one bar or another on weekends enjoying comradery and booze. Sweeney may very well be the elder statesman of them all.
A jolly bear of a drinking man with a white Santa Claus beard, he favors wearing a knitted orange watch cap – orange so he is not mistaken for military on the frontlines. A seasoned war reporter who previously witnessed Russian wars in Chechnya and Syria, Sweeney may be known best for his work at BBC, but is also as a prolific writer. His recent book, Killer in the Kremlin, is a deadly narrative about the authoritarian rise of Vladimir Putin.
Last January, a massive Russian missile designed to destroy aircraft carriers hit a nine-story residential apartment building in Dnipro, Ukraine. Over 50 people were reported murdered, another 80 injured by the Russian mayhem. Six small children died. Sweeney wants people to remember this -- and more.
And so the film, “The Eastern Front: Terror and Torture in Ukraine,” opens with recounting the horrendous targeting of civilians in Dnipro. It then takes us on a journey of unrelenting pace of war crimes that Sweeney says demonstrates Vladimir Putin’s villainous rampage.
“The killing of civilians is not an accident, it is deliberate,” Sweeney told a packed Kyiv theater this summer when the film premiered, and apparently, so is the use of white phosphorous munitions and systematic torture.
Together, Sweeney’s crew speed down roads outside Bakhmut, hit the ground to dodge incoming rockets, wade through mud and visit dark, dungy jails and speak with civilians who have witnessed the horrors of this war and lived to tell their stories.
The film shows a white waterfall of phosphorous slowly raining down from cluster bombs over a residential neighborhood in Bakhmut earlier this year. The waxy substance ignites when in contact with oxygen and burns at 1,472 °F. Hotter than lava.
Video of burning neighborhoods made its way onto social media where pundits debated the claim of its use, but here, Sweeney locates the man who filmed the attack. Another local Ukrainian then walks up to Sweeney and hands him phosphorous cartridges found in the area. Sweeney is left with no doubt. This is the scene of a war crime.
The film finally explores torture in an abandoned jail in Kherson. A former prisoner explains the beatings and hanging methods used on civilians. Then Sweeney finds a gas mask. He saw one before in Chechnya 23 years ago. It’s called an elephant mask and Russian torturers would pour water into the mask as a form or waterboarding. Teargas is also said to have been sprayed into the mask so the prisoner would begin drowning in his own tears and snot.
This is not news to Ukrainians, many of whom live in cities that have been targeted with Russia’s missiles, occupied and destroyed. War crimes are everywhere in Ukraine. It is the new normal. But many in the world need constant reminding, Sweeney told the audience after the screening, especially those who continue to buy into the Russian propaganda of denial that Ukrainian civilians are being targeted.
“It’s for those outside who don’t know or don’t want to know what’s happening – like Tucker Carlson.”