Alexey Kovalev writes:

“Spare people” with low “social value” is how Russian parliamentarian Aleksandr Borodai described his compatriots sent as cannon fodder to Ukraine in a leaked tape, the authenticity of which he later confirmed. Expendable manpower, he explained, can be thrown at Ukraine’s “bravest [and] boldest,” and “exhaust the enemy to the maximum.” Borodai isn’t just anybody: He’s a political consultant from Moscow who declared himself prime minister of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic in Ukraine in 2014, and he’s now a member of the Russian parliament for the ruling United Russia party. Coming from someone this prominent, it is essentially a confirmation of how Russia is running the war.

That the war has changed the composition of the Russian population has long been clear from the incomparably higher rates at which non-Russian ethnic minorities—Buryats, Tatars, Tuvans—are dying in the war. But these are not the only disfavored parts of the Russian population while the Russian leadership shields the politically important populations of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where unrest could endanger the regime and where much of the Russian elite resides. Prisons have been virtually emptied as inmates are sent to the bloodiest sections of the front. And the protection of the major urban populations in European Russia means that the more remote, poorer, and less ethnically Russian regions are bleeding out.

To compensate for the deliberate loss of “expendables” at the front, a crucial part of Moscow’s eugenics program is played by Ukrainians. Several million Ukrainians have been removed from the occupied territories and resettled in Russia, a disproportionate share of them women and children. In their place, Russian settlers are moving in. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of these abducted children are now being Russified to strip them of any Ukrainian identity, a clear echo of the Nazi eugenics policy of shipping blond Polish children back to the Reich to be adopted and turned into Germans. Some of the Ukrainian boys are now old enough to be forcibly conscripted into the Russian army—yet another war crime on an already long list. [Continue reading…]