Are Civilian Casualties A Strategy to Terrorize Ukrainians?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Can you talk to me about the civilian targeting? I mean, the Russians are absolutely clear in everything they tell the world, we do not target civilian infrastructure. And yet, we see before our eyes what’s happened to Mariupol, what civilian targets are hit in other cities, including in Kyiv, and, you know, the number of dead and wounded. But there’s a very sophisticated way that they have of saying, well, this person is a fake and that person is a fake, and it was all actors and it was all staged. Can you get beyond that given that there’s not many independent journalists in Mariupol?

CHRISTO GROZEV, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, BELLINGCAT: We try to. So far, we’ve gathered more than 400 incidents of civilian harm. Of those about 10 percent, 40 of them represent egregious civilian harm incidents, which could have been prevented, should have been prevented with care and compliance with military rules of engagement. What we’re seeing is a neglect on the Russian side of the traditional military rules of engagement that are meant to avoid civilian casualties. Every war will have collateral damage of civilian casualties. What is particular here is that the Russian side does not make the effort. And one makes — one may believe that actually is part of their strategy to terrorize the population in order for pressure to build up on the government to come to some sort of a compromise with Kremlin. But what we see is not only evidence of targets that have zero military infrastructure importance such as schools, hospitals and theaters, as we have seen recently, administrative buildings, but we also see some explanation for why that is happening. There are a lot of intercepted phone calls that are being published by the Ukrainian Security Services and we were able to verify a small portion of that, the ones where they publish also the phone numbers of the calling parties. And we hear a lot of Russian officers and soldiers talking to their loved ones in Russia complaining about the plight that they’re in, and actually, informing their wives, of their spouses that they have been given instructions to ignore the duty of care to civilians, to actually not even pay attention to whom they’re shooting as long as somebody is in their line of view. And this would explain also the total neglect for civilian casualties when artillery or other missile shelling is taken — is implemented.