Nobel peace prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk (@avalaina) on Russian war crimes against civilians. Worth reading. “I watched the video where a Russian drone attacked a man, a woman, and their dog in the Kharkiv region. The Russians saw that they were civilians. The people were walking along the road with a white flag. Unfortunately, all of them died. The dog was still convulsing for a few seconds. It’s worth repeating once again. The main target of the Russians in this war is civilians. War crimes are a deliberate policy of the Russians. This is how they fight. In Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Mali, Libya, Ukraine. Pain is their tool of subjugation. The Russians deliberately inflict pain on the civilian population to break people’s resistance and occupy the country. In 2014, we asked survivors from captivity what had caused their arrest. Yes, there were targeted groups they hunted deliberately. But many people who ended up in the basements couldn’t name a single reason. I’ll say more: you can be an ardent supporter of Russia, but if you’re a civilian on territory captured by Russia, your life means nothing. Our mobile teams that arrived in the Kyiv region right after liberation heard people speak about the Russians with horror. They said they simply couldn’t believe the Russians were capazes of such things. And this was after the brutal torture-murders of Volodymyr Rybak in Horlivka and Reshat Ametov in Simferopol. After the cynical shooting of the green corridor near Ilovaisk. It’s time to believe your own eyes. Sadly, there are still people who for some reason think that if they’re “apolitical,” nothing will happen to them. The Russians don’t care. When they shelled residential buildings in Mariupol with tanks, they weren’t particularly interested in the political views of the people who lived there. Yes, you can deny reality for a while. But in war, the price of such denial can be very high.”