Killing of civilians during war is not new to Russia

When, in May, international human rights bodies addressed Russia’s continued killing of civilians in its war against Ukraine, the entities were unknowingly digging out Moscow’s methods which it employs whenever it has waged war to expand territory.

Historians who have researched the Black Sea basin have recorded events of the North Caucasus and Southern Caucasus, which today lie in the Russian Federation, revealing brutal campaigns by Tsarist Russia annihilating civilians, in a process that bears similarities with what Human Rights Watch and the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine reported.

The end of May reports by the rights groups are an address of the Russian war character that goes back to the 18th–19th centuries Russo-Circassian 100-year campaign that exterminated what the Kremlin derogatively described as “rebellious mountain dwellers” — the Circassian people.

Human Rights Watch wrote on May 22 that “Russian attacks in Ukraine since January 2025 have killed and injured more civilians than in the same period in 2024”.

From Geneva, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine wrote on 28 May: “Russian armed forces have committed the crimes against humanity of murder and the war crimes of attacking civilians, through a months-long pattern of drone attacks targeting civilians on the right bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Province, in Ukraine”.

Belkis Wille, Associate Director in charge of research in Crisis and Conflict at Human Rights Watch, was quoted in the report saying: “Russian attacks are killing and injuring more civilians, including women and children, than before, even as world leaders involved in negotiations express horror at the rising casualties.”

• .

  Keep Reading

• 
  Russian drone attacks kill three in northeast Ukraine
• 
  Why Ngugi wa Thiong'o disappointed Kenyans, Africans in death
• 
  Classic Putin
• 
  The Circassian people's fight for justice and Russia's dark history

The rights body reported that Russian attacks between February 1 and April 4 2025 killed at least 47 civilians and injured more than 180 others. The body, in its research, found the attacks to be unlawful. At a minimum, they violated the international law prohibition on indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks. It said Russian forces failed to distinguish between civilian and military objectives or to avoid the disproportionate civilian casualties that could be expected from the attacks compared to any anticipated military advantage.

The UN Commission on Ukraine said: “So far, almost 150 civilians have been killed and hundreds more have been injured, according to official sources.”

The report added: “...the Commission interviewed over 90 residents of the affected areas in Kherson Province, including victims and witnesses, geolocated over 120 publicly disseminated videos of attacks, collected official documents, and reviewed hundreds of additional videos and text posts available on open sources.”

As The Standard found out, the killing of civilians as is being reported in Ukraine has been the Russian way across history, and Vladimir Putin could be following a script written by his ancestors who, like him, ruled the Russian Empire from the Kremlin.

Putin’s endgame, as was that of the Russian Tsars, was leaked in a speech on Friday (June 20): to acquire more territory. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, he said, "All of Ukraine is ours."

Kyiv Independent reported that the narrative has featured prominently in Putin's rhetoric, often brought up as justification for its aggression in Ukraine. In response to the remark, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Andrii Sybiha, condemned Putin’s comments as "cynical," saying it showed “complete disregard for U.S. peace efforts."

Voice of America award-winning journalist Fatima Tlisova told The Standard that Russia has been getting away with untold atrocities after employing propaganda to falsify history.

In an article published on the VOA website — a fact check on a claim by Russia’s foreign ministry during International Day Against Slavery on 2 December — Tlisova wrote that despite acting as if it did not practise slavery, “Russia was notorious for brutal colonial policies that drove entire nations to extinction while reducing others to the status of ‘ethnic minorities.’”

She referred readers to the book Failed State: A Guide to Russia’s Rupture, by British-American scholar of Russian history Janusz Bugajski, who argues that Russia remains an empire and that Moscow’s ongoing military aggression in Ukraine is colonial.

It is through the falsifying of history that Russia has escaped its atrocities on the Circassian people, who are the original dwellers of the North Caucasus region, which today falls in the south of the Russian Federation.

Material accessed by The Standard from the Georgian Parliament’s archives — which the legislative body used to pass a resolution recognising the Circassian Genocide that climaxed in 1864 — depicted case studies and works of historians which put into perspective today’s killing of civilians in Ukraine by Putin’s armies.

Bezhan Khorava’s work The Circassians, which was created for the purpose of studying in complex the Russia/Circassian problem, in its final section reads:

“During the Russian–Circassian War, the Russian Empire forcefully expelled populations residing in Western and Central parts of the North Caucasus-Abaza. During the war, the Russian authorities were executing the ethnic cleansing of the population. They were deliberately creating such conditions, which aimed at full or partial physical annihilation of the population from this region. As a result, the big part of the Abaza–Circassian population perished, the other part was coerced to flee abroad, and the very small part remained on the territory of the Russian Empire. As a consequence, multi-ethnic groups vanished from the historic arena.”

From the archives of the Georgian parliament, The Standard learns that it was Professor Antero Leitzinger who classified the national tragedy of the Circassians as the most unambiguous genocide among all foreign scholars. He concluded that the genocide of the Circassian people committed by Tsarist Russia in the 19th century was the biggest genocide of that time. His conclusion shapes into the fact that annihilation of the Circassians was the biggest genocide of the 19th century, yet it has been almost entirely forgotten by later history — the world knows of the Jewish Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide which was recognised by the UN, and the Rwandan Genocide that happened towards the end of the 20th century.

The Standard has accessed published historical work pieced together from correspondence from the Kremlin that had been declassified and reveals a scaring, bloodthirsty campaign against civilians sanctioned from the sanctums of power in Moscow long before Putin’s running wars.

A published letter in one of the St. Petersburg volumes of 1891, written by Tsar Nikolai I to General I. P. Paskevich — Russia’s special representative in the Caucasus — reads that “having accomplished the nice work, the new assignment is ahead of you, in my opinion glorious as well, and in terms of its direct benefits much more important — to suppress forever the mountain people and to obliterate disobedience”.

Nicholas I was one of the Russian emperors caught up in the heat of the 101-year-long campaign of removing from Russia what the Kremlin described as “disobedient mountain tribes”, which were largely the Circassian people.

Research works by historian Azamat Kumykov revealed that the subsequent Russian emperor, Alexander II, Nicholas’s successor, in his special transcript underlined the fact that Russia’s military expansion launched 150 years earlier was completed successfully in 1864. He wrote: “…that henceforth in the Caucasus there no longer remains a single rebellious tribe.”

Acts collected by the Caucasian Archaeological Commission record how Emperor Alexander II demanded from his subordinates the driving out of Circassians from their motherland. They were driven out of the marshlands near the Kuban area, and the General who effected their removal, Dmitry Milyutin, recalled thus: inscribed in 1860, the idea of the action plan for the Kuban area was to finally clean up the mountain zone from the native population by forcing them to choose one of two things: either to move to indicated places on the plain and completely submit to Russian rule, or to just abandon the homeland and go to Turkey.

The realisation of the orders, according to several researchers, was through the killing of civilians, burning of villages, destruction of food reserves and crops in the farms, and final expulsion of the population.

Historian Mikhail Ivanovich Venyukov, in The History of Colonisation of the West Caucasus, quotes General Milyutin thus:

“The war was implacable, ruthless and austere. We moved forward slowly step by step, but firmly, cleaning every land, where the soldiers passed, from the mountain-dwellers, to the human being. Hundreds of ‘Alus’ (mountain villages) were burnt to ashes just after the snow had melted… crops were exterminated and even trampled down by the horses.”