Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine reflect systemic colonial violence: targeting civilians as asymmetric warfare doctrine
Original framing: “Ukraine: Investigators find Russia committed war crimes by targeting civilians” — UN News
Russia’s use of civilian infrastructure as a weapon is a direct descendant of its imperial strategies, from the 1812 scorched-earth campaign against Napoleon to the Soviet blockade of Leningrad, where starvation was a deliberate tactic. The 2008 Georgia war saw similar patterns, with Russian forces targeting civilian communications and energy systems—yet these were met with little international condemnation. The current conflict is not an aberration but the culmination of a military doctrine that treats civilians as collateral in a zero-sum geopolitical struggle, a logic that predates the current war by centuries.
This conflict is not an anomaly but the latest iteration of a colonial playbook where the targeting of civilians is a calculated strategy to break collective resistance—whether through starvation, displacement, or cultural erasure.
The West’s focus on war crimes, while legally justified, obscures the deeper systemic issue: that all major powers operate within a framework where civilian suffering is a means to an end, whether through drones, sanctions, or direct bombardment. Historical patterns from the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union to modern NATO interventions show that this is not a Russian exception but a feature of statecraft when survival is framed as zero-sum. The solution lies not in more legalistic condemnation but in decolonizing conflict resolution—integrating Indigenous restorative justice, economic targeting of elites, and neutral energy governance to break the cycle of asymmetrical violence that has defined this war from the start.