“The emperor only values his throne and will do anything to protect it, while all others are mere resources to be exploited,” writes Aleksandar Đokić, a Serbian political scientist and former lecturer at RUDN University in Moscow. “In other words, the Russian empire is knowingly throwing its own people, people of its own nation, into a meatgrinder, a virtual abyss.”
I’ve seen a few commenters back on Reddit argue that it’s unfair to focus on Russian war crimes when Ukrainian soldiers have also committed war crimes. The whataboutism that some people use to defend these empires are truly mind boggling sometimes.