The images and testimonies that have been coming out of war-torn Ukraine in recent days, specifically those from the region northeast of Kyiv, are horror incarnate.
In the city of Bucha, the streets appear to be littered with dead bodies of civilians, some of men who were handcuffed before being unceremoniously executed.
In other places liberated by the Ukrainians, more despicable and heinous acts were uncovered: bodies of women whose lower body parts have been burned in an apparent attempt to conceal acts of rape; the body of a man who was tortured and thrown into a sewer pit after being executed; the head of a Ukrainian villager who was murdered alongside her family and then dumped into a mass grave.
All of these were documented and caught on tape.
In addition, there are reports of mass graves with hundreds of bodies, extensive and unusual looting, and even stories of a market in Belarus where Russians peddle the goods stoles from Ukrainians.
Just before Russia’s invasion of its neighbor - the one some Israeli experts announced would never actually happen - American intelligence warned of Moscow’s intentions, which includes the liquidation, deportation or arrest of the Ukrainian elite
In the port city of Mariupol - where thousands of civilians are stranded and Ukrainian forces are locked in a desperate and hopeless battle with the Russians - residents have reported the deportation of hundreds of Ukrainians into Russia, whose fate thus far remains unknown.
Moscow’s endgame, Western intelligence agencies warned, is not merely the occupation of Ukraine, but the destruction of the very idea that is Ukrainian nationalism.
According to Russian president and invasion mastermind, Vladimir Putin, this goal can only be achieved by "de-Nazifying" its neighbor.
The term “de-Nazification” does not warrant an explanation. We all agree on what kind of fate Nazis deserve. History also remembers the destruction Russia’s Red Army rained upon the Nazis during World War II.
Therefore, it is exceedingly clear that Moscow's plan for Ukraine includes the practical extermination of any and all opposing the Kremlin's influence.
The shock felt in Ukraine and the West in the face of these atrocities is understandable and justified, the widespread demand to investigate Russia over potential war crimes, and perhaps even crimes against humanity, even more so.
But this is exactly the moment to stop and see the historical evil taking place before our very eyes.
After all, before Putin embarked on his crime spree in Ukraine, he committed very similar atrocities in Chechnya. Worse still, is that "the Russian Tsar" made sure that the bloody dictatorship of Syrian President Bashar Assad holds firm despite its own countless war crimes.
Those who claim that the West was never “interested" in the war in Syria - are wrong. I was there, on the beaches of the island of Kos in Greece, when small rubber boats with Syrian refugees made landfall in the middle of summer.
The international media covered the Syrian war with the utmost diligence, and out of empathy for the people fighting for their freedom. The most powerful country in Europe - Germany - had opened its gates to thousands of refugees, while over half of all German citizens donated money, clothing and food to those fleeing the war.
Then, news started coming out of Syria about the Russian Air Force dropping bombs into the heart of residential areas, about Assad regime’s knack for torturing thousands of its own people, about a massive crematorium built specifically to incinerate the countless bodies of those executed by the army.
It is not farfetched to assume that in a year or two, historians will find that the methods the Russians used in Syria - successfully or not - were the same applied in the Ukraine war.
In fact, there is no need to await historians’ findings. The first drafts of their would-be accounts have already been published in the media. Those Russian pilots who bombed civilian populations in Aleppo, who were even photographed with Assad, were caught in Ukraine, trying to carry out their disgusting mission once again.
The war in Ukraine is no Holocaust, and yet we should neither diminish the impact of the horrors perpetrated there nor the need to act in the face of these atrocities.
The first cases of genocide in the modern era occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Africa. One of them was of two small tribes in Namibia, which were utterly destroyed by German colonialists. Historians argue that both systematically, and in its ideology of racial hierarchy, the German exterminations in Africa prepared the ground for the genocide of the Jewish people.
The connection to our day and age is clear: the peoples of Asia, South America and Africa have been repeatedly forced to take part in murderous experiments perpetuated by rulers and forces from the West.
History’s lesson is clear: not only do thugs like Putin need to be stopped when they are not very powerful, but that such atrocities are not conducted in a vacuum and the rest of the world has responsibility to stop it.
Those who do not stop and punish the Russians for their crimes in Ukraine, will find such atrocities occurring close to their homes.