Russia's attack on Kharkiv: Putin aims to decrease Ukraine's population

Russia's August 30 attack on Kharkiv left at least 7 people killed, including a 14-year-old girl, and 97 wounded.

Amidst the long-suffering of Kharkiv, this Russian crime looks exceptional and reminds us that the Russian leadership won't stop at any level of brutality just to intimidate Ukrainians and remind them of their capabilities, at least in areas that share a border with the Russian Federation.

After every crime committed by Putin, many people discuss his supposed lack of motivation. I believe that there is no point in talking about Putin's seemingly unmotivated cruelty. Like every experienced maniac, his crimes have their motives. Putin is clearly aware of what he is doing, and he is giving the appropriate orders to his generals. First of all, Putin genuinely wants to intimidate Ukrainians. His aim is to force Ukrainians to surrender. He wants Ukrainians to believe that only by surrendering to Russia—only by accepting the conditions and ultimatums that Putin has been putting forward to Ukraine in recent years—can they live without fear of being killed in their apartments by bombings.

Putin wants to reduce the number of Ukrainians. I'm convinced that there is an obvious demographic motive behind the actions of the Russian army. Putin's Russia is uncomfortable having a large European state as a neighbor, especially one that was once part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Putin's Russia is frightened by this state's success, by the fact that its citizens have demonstrated to the world, and to Russians themselves, an alternative path of development—a path toward the civilized world—while Russia itself, the former center of this empire, is sinking deeper into darkness. Therefore, the fewer people who live in this neighboring country, even if the Russians do not succeed in completely taking it over, the better it is for Putin.

This is not the first time that Russian authorities have resorted to such horrific actions. The demographic war with Ukraine has been ongoing since the Pereyaslav Rada. Tsarist troops massacred entire Ukrainian cities. The empire pursued a policy of marginalizing Ukrainians and populating the major cities of the Russian Empire with people from different regions of the state, in order to erode the Ukrainian national and civilizational influence on the ethnic territory of the Ukrainian people.

This was followed by the war against the Ukrainian People's Republic, the Holodomor, and Stalinist repressions. This was also a real demographic bomb against Ukrainians. If we also consider the number of Ukrainian victims during the Second World War, both at the front and among the civilian population, it wasn't just the extermination of the population—often deliberate, as during the Holodomor—but also the replacement of the Ukrainian population with people from other regions of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, primarily from the Russian Federation itself.

Now we see almost the same results. Putin hopes that his brutal actions against Ukrainians will force them to leave their homes, to flee this brutal war to other countries. Indeed, millions of people have already been forced to flee their homes during the first stage of Russia's Great War against Ukraine. By prolonging the war, Putin hopes that these people will never return home.

Even if he fails to capture the entire territory of Ukraine, even if he fails to implement his moronic project of the so-called Novorossiya, even if his troops do not demonstrate effectiveness at the front, even if he now has to think about how to liberate from Ukrainian troops those areas of the Kursk region that are under the control of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Ukraine is being reduced from a large state into a smaller one in terms of population. And this is something that pleases Putin as a man who has fulfilled his desires and implemented the chauvinistic idea that has always defined relations between Moscow and Kyiv over the past centuries.

And now these vicious attacks on Kharkiv—a large city close to the Russian border. As we can see, on the one hand, they propagate myths about Kharkiv being a ‘Russian city,’ and on the other hand, they destroy the same Kharkiv, dropping bombs right in the center of this city. Using modified bombs to destroy residential areas is, of course, a terrible situation that should never be forgotten.

This situation once again proves that Ukraine is at war with real war criminals, with people who primarily target civilians, not the army. Their main objective is to intimidate the civilian population. They are not afraid of human casualties in residential areas and are ready to cynically deny any responsibility for what is happening, claiming that the Ukrainian air defense system is a fiction, just as they did in the case of Bucha, which they claimed was deliberately falsified to compromise the "honest" image of the Russian army.

In fact, these people are ready to commit crimes and murders, and moreover, they consider these crimes and murders to be a great opportunity to carry out their plan to destroy Ukraine. Some in Russia have always been fond of the aphorism that war is a continuation of politics. For Russians, not only is war a continuation of politics, but also crimes, murders, rapes, robberies, and bombings of peaceful cities are a continuation of politics.

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About the author. Vitaly Portnikov, journalist, winner of the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine.

The editors don't always share the opinions expressed by the authors of the blogs.