(John Ransom, Headline USA) Video provided by Radio Free Europe shows Russian troops firing on and hitting a father who is driving with his son, both unarmed, to escape the war in Ukraine.
“Please don’t die, Dad” pleaded the son as clung to his fatally wounded father after the family was cut down by Russian tank fire on a country lane, according to the Daily Mail’s account of the video.
While Vietnam may have been the first televised war, the war in Ukraine is turning out to be the first social media-covered war, and the images are disturbing and terrifying.
A video at UK’s LBC shows a Russian soldier threatening a Ukrainian crowd with hand grenades, as he makes his way through the shouting crowd, even as the United Nations reported one million refugees amid 2,000 civilian Ukraine casualties, reported LBC.
Time showed the photo of a bloodstained sheet over a boy, 16, who was killed playing soccer in Mariupol, as result of sudden Russian shelling, his father, holding his son’s head, mourning the boy’s death with “sobs”.
Russian mob boss Vladimir Putin called Ukraine leaders “gangsters” and claimed that they are using civilians as “human shields,” said the Daily Mail, which is resulting in such casualties.
That was a claim that may have worked in the old days, when Putin made his bones in the Soviet KGB, but social media has tarnished the patina of lies that Russian communists used to hide behind with impunity.
Images like the ones of the Russian tank killing a civilian aren’t just images that stir emotions, but could be used against Putin in a potential war crimes trial.
“I want to be very clear about this, that Mr. Putin is a war criminal,” former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told the Council on Foreign Relations on Thursday, according to CNN. “He has to sit behind the bars in International Criminal Court.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson echoed the comments to Parliament.
“What we have seen already from Vladimir Putin’s regime in the use of the munitions that they have already been dropping on innocent civilians … in my view, [it] already fully qualifies as a war crime,” Johnson said at the UK parliament, according to Australia’s 9 News.
