Crocodile tears and blatant hypocrisy! Read Russia's own history of attacking and killing its own citizens!
Russia's wars in Chechnya offer a grim warning of what could be in Ukraine, March 12, 20228:27 AM ET,
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/12/10858...-be-in-ukraine
Russia unleashes a heavy bombing campaign. Cities and towns are reduced to rubble. Thousands of civilians are killed.
Russia did this twice — against fellow Russian citizens — in Chechnya in the 1990s. That raises the question of whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is using the same playbook as he wages war in Ukraine today.
In Chechnya, a tiny Muslim republic in southern Russia with just 1.5 million people, resistance to Russian rule dates back at least two centuries. Rebels there began agitating for independence after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
After a couple of years of increasing tension, Russia unleashed a major invasion marked by relentless airstrikes and salvos of heavy artillery. Thousands of fighters and tens of thousands of Chechen civilians were killed. The Chechen capital, Grozny, was laid to waste.
Block after block, most every building was completely gutted. No other city had been so intensely bombed for decades. The devastation evoked those black-and-white photos of European cities pummeled in World War II.
Russia waged the campaign for two years, with its powerful military trying and repeatedly failing to crush a small band of rebels. Remarkably, Russia lost.
President Boris Yeltsin's government in 1996 signed a peace treaty with Chechnya, removed all Russian troops from the territory and granted broad autonomy to Chechnya, though not formal independence.
Putin comes to power
But three years later, as Yeltsin was about to leave office, he named an obscure spy turned politician to be his prime minister — Vladimir Putin.
Putin assumed that office on Aug. 9, 1999, and by the end of that month, Russia was waging a renewed bombing campaign against Chechen rebels in an attempt to reverse the earlier humiliation.
The second Chechen war was also brutal, though it proved more effective. Russian forces took control of the breakaway republic after just a few months.
In March 2000, a triumphant Putin, who had by this time become president, flew to Grozny in a Russian fighter jet. He emerged from the aircraft in a full pilot suit, to commemorate the victory.
Putin installed a Kremlin-friendly leader, Akhmad Kadyrov, to strengthen his hold of the territory. Kadyrov was assassinated in 2004, but his son, Ramzan Kadyrov, now rules Chechnya.
In the current battle in Ukraine, Chechen forces have been sent in to fight with the Russian military."