Vladimir Putin's incendiary government is again acutely inflaming East-West tensions and escalating its war on the free world.
Earlier this week the Russian dictator's mouthpiece, Dmitri Peskov, announced that two Americans fighting with the Ukrainian army, Alex Drueke and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, had been captured near Kharkiv and have been branded "soldiers of fortune" by the Russian government. (Photo, ABC News.) Peskov asserted that the two men fall outside the Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war.
The two fighters will be "held responsible for the crimes they have committed," said Peskov. Yet they committed no war crimes. They were acting as lawful Ukrainian soldiers when their unit suffered heavy shelling by illegally invading Russian forces. But given Peskov's contention that they lack the protection of international laws of war — POWs are due humane treatment and are free from prosecution — they'll almost certainly receive sentences of death.
Russia had already established a history of rogue justice concerning such prisoners of war. On 9 June, Putin's sham government in the Donbas — the Donetsk People's Republic — sentenced to death by firing squad three other prisoners of foreign origin: Aiden Aslin, Shaun Pinner (both British) and Brahim Saadoun (Moroccan). Each was serving with the Ukrainian army.
Russian prosecutors, however, labeled them "mercenaries and terrorists" and charged them with attempting to overthrow the People’s Republic — again, an illegitimate, Putinesque puppet unrecognized by any nation other than Russia. Britain's foreign secretary made clear her nation's displeasure with the Kremlin's illegal act.
I utterly condemn the sentencing of Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner held by Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine.
— Liz Truss (@trussliz) June 9, 2022
They are prisoners of war. This is a sham judgment with absolutely no legitimacy.
My thoughts are with the families. We continue to do everything we can to support them.
International law experts speculated at the time that "the trial appeared calculated to discourage foreign volunteers, including Americans." Although the speculation is self-evident, Russia's intention, just as obviously, has failed in effectiveness. Nevertheless, on the day of Aslin, Pinner and Saadoun's sentencing, "judicial officials in the Donetsk People’s Republic ... doubled down on their contention that the men were violent mercenaries deserving of death."
The far larger issue at hand is one of the West's tolerance of Vladimir Putin's deadly provocations and psychological debauchery. Each day he escalates both, and they come in the context of his illegal invasion and his actual war crimes. Now he is on the precipice of murdering Americans and Brits, turned valid as well as valiant defenders of Ukraine — within the Ukrainian army. Required is something more than Western tweets.
While it's true that both the U.S. and the U.K. have discouraged nationals from enlisting in Ukraine's armed forces, Putin's penalty for doing so is not only appalling, it should go unsuffered. Pity the poor captives, yet his internationally outlawed act against them is also one of violent grotesquerie toward all free peoples. The exigent and inescapable question, then, is one of how long the free West will tolerate the Russian despot's atrocities against all humanity.