Europe

Vile Russian filth.

That's not very nice at all

let the partisans into Mariupol

Fucking war criminals.

Honestly asking because I can't see any other explanations: is Russia exempt from all war crimes?

I suppose what one has here is an example of one of two conflicting schools of thought regarding counterinsurgency warfare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_and_tactics_of_guerrilla_warfare

Strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare

The main strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare tend to involve the use of a small attacking, mobile force against a large, unwieldy force. The guerrilla force is largely or entirely organized in small units that are dependent on the support of the local population. Tactically, the guerrilla army makes the repetitive attacks far from the opponent's center of gravity with a view to keeping its own casualties to a minimum and imposing a constant debilitating strain on the enemy. This may provoke the enemy into a brutal, excessively destructive response which will both anger their own supporters and increase support for the guerrillas, ultimately compelling the enemy to withdraw.

An article from early 2022 about the conflict:

https://mwi.westpoint.edu/dont-underestimate-the-bear-russia-is-one-of-the-worlds-most-effective-modern-counterinsurgents/

Since the overwhelming Russian forces may well end up occupying at least part of the country, a Ukrainian insurgency will be part of the armed resistance.

The Logic of Russian Counterinsurgency

There are two primary ways of countering insurgencies: states can either try to win hearts and minds or crush them. Both distill down to the challenge of fighting an elusive enemy hiding among the people. Modern Western military thought considers such a fight an indirect, population-centric approach hinging on the state’s ability to enhance the populace’s collaboration with the government. This assumes that strengthening the ties between people and state authorities augments the latter’s legitimacy while simultaneously weakening the insurgent’s position.

But while this approach emphasizes collaboration, there are other potential pathways toward control. Stathis Kalyvas, for example, has pointed out how the use of force can lead to more or less unquestioned dominance. Here, occupying forces can establish control through effective sanctions aimed at insurgents and their supporters. They use force to neutralize opponents and coerce people to comply with the government. Typically, the identification problem caused by the elusive nature of the opponent makes it particularly hard to target these sanctions and therefore indiscriminate violence and collective punishment are common. Thus, instead of enhancing governmental legitimacy this brutal, so-called authoritarian approach essentially revolves around gaining control through repression.

Recent Russian military campaigns in Chechnya and Syria, which featured indiscriminate violence and collective punishment, make clear that modern Russian armed forces adhere to an authoritarian counterinsurgency strategy. Moreover, an analysis of the historical track record reveals that this brutal approach has not only become a trademark of Russian counterinsurgency but has also brought unprecedented success. Of the twenty-four rebellions and insurgencies encountered between 1917 and 2017 Russia (or the Soviet Union) “won” twenty-one of these conflicts—an astonishing 87.5 percent—where “won” means that “the insurgency is militarily defeated and its organization destroyed, or the war ends without any political concessions granted to insurgent forces.” This makes Russia one of the world’s most effective modern counterinsurgents.

The most eye-catching feature of Russian counterinsurgency is its brutality, or more precisely its heavy reliance on massive force and suppression in the form of indiscriminate violence and collective punishment. The specific use of both methods and their interaction depends on capabilities and local regime characteristics. Historically, Russia has employed indiscriminate violence when its capabilities have been limited. In such cases the counterinsurgent was weakly rooted in the target society and local asymmetries favored the insurgency. Collective punishment, by contrast, has been most commonly observed under Russian regimes with strong capabilities and a sufficient degree of state penetration in the local population. In both cases, unquestioned dominance is achieved by unleashing brutal force on people living within the territory in which an insurgency takes place.