Quote (chopstickz777 @ Jun 2 2022 07:15pm)
Breaking:
Tribunal over Ukrainian warcrimes will be held in Mariupol. It will be called the Mariupol Tribunal. In addition to the Ukrainian Nazis who committed warcrimes in Mariupol, foreign mercenaries and NATO instructors will also be tried there.
This whole back and forth only makes sense if Ukraine's goal was the cynically dissuade their own troops from surrendering for fear of reprisals.
Ukraine held these farcical war crime trials while the war is still ongoing, persecuting POWs publicly. Knowing Russia would retaliate tit-for-tat, as escalations go.
It would be really hard for Russia to sit back and watch Russian POWs be subject to war crime trials and not do the same to Ukrainians. They could plausibly have resisted the urge out of pragmatism for what follows, but Russia is too bitterly retaliatory
So Russia does the same to the Ukrainians, and what's the net result? Soldiers on both sides are less likely to surrender, fearing reprisals and mistreatment by the other side.
Which favors the currently entrenched and losing Ukrainian position. They
want their troops to fight to the death in hopeless battles instead of aiming for any tactical victories, just to slow down the Russian advance.
It sure does make a mockery of the entire concept of international criminal courts. The Nuremberg Trials were held knowing the taint of victor's justice, and the prosecutors took strides to grant reasonably fair trials and several high level Nazis were exonerated. These meanwhile are just show trials at wartime, for no purpose but strategic propaganda and manipulation. The Ukrainians started it, the Russians acted in kind.