How much blood­shed, destruc­tion and chaos Vladimir Putin is will­ing to inflict upon Ukraine can be guessed at by look­ing at how far he’s already gone down the road to per­fidy and infamy. And bear in mind he claims to be doing it to “de-Naz­i­fy” the coun­try and end “bul­ly­ing and genocide.”

Fears that he could turn to “uncon­ven­tion­al” means, like chem­i­cal weapons, have already been jus­ti­fied by the Rus­sians’ use of clus­ter bombs. The 2010 Con­ven­tion on Clus­ter Muni­tions (which Rus­sia has not signed) “pro­hibits under any cir­cum­stances the use, devel­op­ment, pro­duc­tion, acqui­si­tion, stock­pil­ing and trans­fer of clus­ter muni­tions, as well as the assis­tance or encour­age­ment of any­one to engage in pro­hib­it­ed activities.”

Clus­ter muni­tions are “dumb bombs”, mean­ing their tar­get­ing is pret­ty much ran­dom. They’re deployed in the form of a large shell which, when dropped from a plane or fired from a ground-based rock­et, explodes in the air, scat­ter­ing dozens and some­times hun­dreds of small bomblets over an area the size of a foot­ball field. These sec­ondary muni­tions fre­quent­ly do not to det­o­nate on impact, remain­ing active until touched. In effect, they are anti-per­son­nel mines that can be det­o­nat­ed by some­thing as innocu­ous as an inad­ver­tent toe stub, or a child pick­ing one up.
NOTE: The U.S. did not take part in the anti-clus­ter bomb treaty nego­ti­a­tions. Accord­ing to Human Rights Watch: “…behind-the-scenes the U.S. put pres­sure on its allies to not par­tic­i­pate in the process at all, and if they did par­tic­i­pate, to reject the notion of a ban.”
Along with such lumi­nar­ies as Chi­na and North Korea, the U.S. has still not signed the agree­ment, either.
Clus­ter bombs were used in Libya by Qaddafi’s forces and as recent­ly as 2019 by Libyan rebels, as well as in Sudan, Syr­ia (at least 14 types, all Russ­ian-made) and by the Sau­di-led coali­tion in Yemen. The U.S. dropped them in Iraq, but — to damn with faint praise — not in heav­i­ly pop­u­lat­ed civil­ian areas.
Wher­ev­er they were deployed, how­ev­er, Human Rights Watch not­ed that the weapons “…were not a mil­i­tary game-chang­er in any of these con­flicts. Instead, they caused dev­as­tat­ing harm to civil­ians and cre­at­ed a fore­see­able human­i­tar­i­an lia­bil­i­ty that will last for years.”

                             INNOCENT CASUALTIES

Esti­mates of the per­cent­age of civil­ians ver­sus mil­i­tary per­son­nel killed in mod­ern war­fare vary, but the sta­tis­tics indi­cate while it is not the “90 per­cent are civil­ian” as once was thought, more than fifty per­cent is not off the mark.
Many of them fall into that hideous­ly bland and decep­tive cat­e­go­ry “col­lat­er­al dam­age” (mil­i­tary obfus­ca­tion for “we f***** up”). Appar­ent­ly, it is sup­posed to offer the solace that inad­ver­tent maim­ing and death isn’t as bad as being a tar­get, which Ukrain­ian civil­ians clear­ly are.
One way to min­imise casu­al­ties is so-called “human­i­tar­i­an cor­ri­dors” that allow civil­ians safe pas­sage out of com­bat and tar­get zones. The Rus­sians have been shame­less­ly trans­lat­ing them as “easy targets”.
And if a human­i­tar­i­an cor­ri­dor is nec­es­sary, then sure­ly by def­i­n­i­tion what neces­si­tates it is un-human­i­tar­i­an. That’s anoth­er way of say­ing sav­agery, bru­tal­i­ty, take your pick of those or any sim­i­lar pejo­ra­tive. In some cas­es, it also offers a pri­ma facia case for a war crime. What is beyond argu­ment is that tar­get­ing civil­ians is cowardly.
To make that judge­ment, even from afar, you only need con­sid­er snap­shots of peo­ple flee­ing the shelling of Ukrain­ian towns: a pre­car­i­ous cross­ing of a makeshift bridge…an elder­ly woman being pulled along in a super­mar­ket trolley…a boy who looks under ten with two back­packs, one on his back and one on his chest, car­ry­ing what remains of his life.

                            PITILESS PERSONIFIED

And as his­to­ry has shown, Vladimir Putin and his gen­er­als have no qualms about pul­veris­ing civil­ians. Chech­nya was a case study in Krem­lin cal­lous­ness. As in Ukraine, the shelling was indis­crim­i­nate. Main­ly eth­nic Russ­ian neigh­bour­hoods in Grozny were hit as bad­ly as Chechen pop­u­lat­ed ones.
Nor is the Russ­ian mil­i­tary over­ly con­cerned about the casu­al­ty rate among its own troops. Two Russ­ian army cap­tains I inter­viewed (off cam­era and off the record) in a bunker out­side Grozny described the street fight­ing there as “a meat grinder” of conscripts.
Both were vet­er­ans of the war in Afghanistan, which they called “hor­ri­ble”. Both made it clear with­out putting it in so many words that they held their supe­ri­ors, polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary, in low esteem. Like sol­diers every­where, how­ev­er, they obeyed orders.
There is lit­tle rea­son to think they don’t have kin­dred spir­its among the Russ­ian con­scripts fight­ing in Ukraine. 
Vladimir Putin has made the same hubris­tic mis­take the Bush admin­is­tra­tion did when it thought the inva­sion of Iraq would be a “cake­walk”.
When Putin final­ly fig­ures out that Ukraine isn’t going to crum­ble like stale cake in the face of his over­whelm­ing­ly supe­ri­or con­ven­tion­al forces, expect the worst, and heed the wis­dom of 19th cen­tu­ry Ger­man philoso­pher Friedrich Niet­zsche: “But thus I coun­sel you, my friends: Mis­trust all in whom the impulse to pun­ish is powerful.”

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