The shelling by Russian troops of a children's hospital and a maternity hospital in Mariupol has become one of the most terrible symbols of the criminal war being waged against the Ukrainian people by Vladimir Putin and the Russian armed forces. Until recently, Adolf Hitler was considered a classic war criminal of our time - it would seem that it can be compared with gas chambers, death trains and executions of innocent people, women and children in ravines and forests.

Now we know what. A few days ago, few people in the world could have imagined that in front of our eyes in the center of Europe, under the lenses of television and cameras, Russian aviation would hit a maternity hospital. Just like that - in the maternity hospital! With the same dispassionate cruelty with which they recently hit the residential areas of Kharkov, Chernigov and Sumy, destroyed all life in their path in the small towns of Ukraine, literally deprived people of the right to live and turned them into hostages of their stupid atrocities.. In order not to fall into pathos, I will simply quote the notes of the famous publicist Anatoly Strelyany, who is just these days - yes, what is there, lives! - in Akhtyrka, practically destroyed by the Russians.

" In the entrance of the house where I am now, the windows were broken, which I noticed only when the glass crackled under my feet.

The pavement was littered with window shards from apartments.. Few passers-by. Broken glass was already covered with plywood by silent young men.

I walked a little more and saw the destroyed part of the center. The city hall was gone, the large House of Culture was damaged, many shops, on one corner I saw a funnel three meters deep and five meters in diameter. The sidewalks on both sides of the main street were littered with rubble.. They have already been dismantled, put into trucks.

Separately from everyone else, an old woman swept in front of her entrance - just like in peacetime"

Everyday life of war. The routine of war crimes. Some other abomination may be committed this night, then the sun will rise, and there will be a new raid, new murders, new mockery of people.

I no longer wonder why he does this and why they carry out these criminal orders and actually bury the country whose military personnel they are. It's some sort of nationwide conspiracy of sadists. Even in Nazi Germany, there was no such nightmare - because there was no television and the Internet, and you could pretend that " But here you can’t get away that you didn’t know - maybe you didn’t want to know, but you knew anyway. Knew about Kharkov. Knew about Sumy. Knew about Mariupol. A whole nation of child killers? Is that possible?

Turns out it might not..

I don’t even urge you to think about the reputation of Russia and the Russian people, covered in blood and mud - to be honest, Russia and the Russian people no longer have any reputation and will not be in the coming decades. I just don’t understand how millions of people living in a huge country don’t see that it is literally rushing into some kind of terrible gloomy abyss - if it hasn’t already fallen into it. Each new day of the war with Ukraine, each new day of crimes, economic sanctions, moral and political degradation is a sentence to the very existence of Russia as a state and society. Russia literally disappears in a bloody haze of the crimes of its army and the ambitions of its crazed ruler - and the people who live in Russia simply indifferently follow the wreck of this derailed train, as if they themselves are not riding in it.

This I absolutely do not understand and never will understand.. I understand the logic of Ukrainian resistance - even if it is resistance to a strong enemy and it leads to numerous victims.

I understand the logic of Western caution - to hit with sanctions, not war, so as not to end up in the funnel of an exchange of nuclear strikes. But I don’t understand the logic of Russian indifference to their own future, this demonstrative, idiotically reaching stupor.

How is it possible - not to resist your own collapse, not to try to stop the machine of destruction launched by Vladimir Putin Russia? How can a whole people show such indifference to their own terrible crimes and to their own terrible fate?

I do not understand.