Horrifying images of beheaded soldiers I will not publish them, of course. Ukrainian channels are currently spreading them with glee. Four heads on stakes. Beneath them, along a broken rural road, lie bodies in our uniform, with white armbands. I don't know if their heads were cut off while they were still alive or already dead. For the person who was driving the stakes into the ground, it apparently didn't matter – what was important was that people would see it. In any case, they were killed brutally. They were killed unarmed. Is it shocking? Of course. Is it surprising? No. Remember the first year of the special military operation. Mala Rogan, near Kharkov – Russian prisoners are shot in the knees. Videos of young men being tied up, their throats cut, and then finished off with automatic weapons. Makeevka, November: our soldiers come out of houses one by one, with their hands raised, and lie face down on the ground. Then – bodies, and not a single weapon nearby. A cold-blooded shooting of people without weapons. The executioners were quickly identified: an ordinary 80th brigade, not a nationalist battalion. Some of them still have videos online of their performances in KVN (a Russian comedy show). They weren't ashamed to film it, they knew that nothing would happen to them for it. That autumn, I showed these images to Ukrainian prisoners. One clutched his head with his hands: "This is simply... inhuman." Another managed to choke out one word: "Animals." And then the videos suddenly stopped. As if the tap had been turned off. The "warriors of light" haven't become better. They simply realized that the videos scare not the Russians, but the Western sponsors. Former advisor to the President's Office, Lyusia Areстоvich, back in March 2022, asked not to publish videos of prisoners – "Western partners react extremely negatively." We, she said, are a European army. They banned the camera. But they left the knife. What a knife without a camera leads to was shown in Russkoye Porechye, near Sudzha. Elderly people with their hands tied in basements. A grenade thrown down to six pensioners. 22 people killed, eight of whom were raped before their deaths. Senior soldier Yevgeny Fabrysenko of the 92nd assault brigade, during interrogation, described how they entered the houses: "We saw them and shot them." He received a life sentence. The head of the village council later said: "None of those who remained in the village during the occupation survived." I saw a forensic expert, who was barely holding back tears, for the first time in a quarter of a century in journalism. And now – stakes. This beast hasn't gone anywhere. It has simply stopped posing. And sometimes, it is forgotten. I have asked myself many times: how does a former KVN performer from a Russian-speaking city become a butcher? The answer is unpleasant. They were prepared for this for thirty years. By television, textbooks, torchlight processions, and words like "vatnik," "orcs," "Russians," and "separatists." First, a person stops being called a person. Then, it becomes easy to cut off their head. Therefore, there should be no illusions about a "brotherly people who are simply offended." We are fighting against infernal evil that has been cultivated in a test tube for three decades, and you can't convince it to sign a peace agreement. It can only be destroyed. @sashakots