Ukrainian POW beheaded by Russian troops.

I've read about this elsewhere

It appears to serve a couple of purposes for Russia one of which is to encourage their own troops not to surrender for fear of retribution, i.e. 'you might as well die fighting because if you surrender after we've done this the other side will do at least the same back'

However it'll have the same effect on the Ukrainians and increase their resolve.

Meanwhile Russia are presiding over the UN Security Council.....

Sadly I think the Russian psyche is that it does not matter, or almost it is a "good thing". From afar, they seem the revel in the fact that 20 million Russians died in the Great Patriotic War - a lot due to the same human wave tactics that are still being employed today in Ukraine. Rather than be horrified that so many had to be lost to beat Hitler. And that another x million in Ukraine is more proof of how Russia is the underdog and everyone wants to destroy us etc etc. 

Well indeed my generation is smaller than my patents and my children's generation will be smaller still given how many of my peers have left trying for children until their late 30s only to find they can't have them. It's a common theme in most modern countries which is why sending several hundred thousand of your young adults to be slaughtered isn't a clever idea!

People from St Petersburg and Moscow are the only ones that are important to Putin and his cronies.
The whole of the rest of the population is expendable to them.

We 'entertained' a young Russian for a few hours last year - he came across about this time to work on one of the local farms and had difficulty getting there so we let him sleep on the settee.
He was from somewhere central in the country and seemed very pleasant and polite.
The job was only over the summer at the end of his 1st year medical degree but he sadly went home to start year 2. I wonder if he has been conscripted as he was definitely from one of the 'don't give a shit about them' areas. 
We bumped into him a couple of times last summer and he didn't come across as the more normal Russian you meet when they're overseas, i.e. brash, arrogant and unpleasant.

It is utterly horrific, and medieval. And very worrying that even now - not just 1940's Germany/Russia - you can desensitise most of a population to the extent where local bloggers don't even see what is wrong with this. Videos of castrations and beheadings of captured uniformed fighters, who should have been protected under the Geneva conventions, are shared for laughs.

This, and all the attacks directly on civilians, is what I was worried about when Russia invaded. Anyone who followed Russians fighting in Africa and Syria will know that they match ISIS for brutality, and that's not convicts and conscripts - Wagner was, until decimated in this war, comprised mainly of ex regular elite Russian troops. They (all Russian armed forces not just Wagner) also directly target civilians - endlessly targetting hospitals, and carrying out terrorist style double strikes on civilian buildings - one to destroy them, another to kill and wound as many of the rescuers as possible as they know the buildings will be crawling with them. Then they hit the hospital they know everyone will have gone to. Utterly, utterly inhumane, and obvious war crimes. We have seen exactly the same thing in Ukraine - some of the civilian hits are just innacurate weapons, but some like the Mariupol theatre and all the murders in Bucha are a clear intention to mass-kill civilians.

This is what pees me off so much when Russians whine about how the West is against them, and penalises them in sport, and with sanctions, and so on. We penalise you because you don't even pretend to abide by basic standards of human dignity, let alone international law. It's not acceptable, and we must be resolved to do everything we can to ensure Russia does not succeed in this enterprise. There is too much caving-in going on, with Wimbledon, the Olympics, and so on. Every single avenue to make as many russians - and other people around the world who might be about to do the same (hello, China) - realise that this will never be accepted, needs to be taken.

Were I single, not a parent, and in my 20's/30's when this kicked off, I honestly would have thought long and hard about going to join the Ukranian Foreign Legion - I think it's >50% that I would have done so. Its the clearest fight against evil in a long, long time - a modern european nation just blatantly invading another developed european nation in the style of a land grab from hundreds of years ago, then behaving as disgustingly as possible towards its inhabitants.

I don't want to say anything about "all Russians" here, that's not the fight, the fight is against this regime and innocent conscripted Russians are among the victims - in their tens of thousands, and I feel bad for them. Sadly they have to keep dying in droves until their countrymen oust their regime, because of nuclear weapons, and hypocrisy, we cannot do that for them.

It does disappoint me how hands off we've been generally but it is because of the one successful element of Russias war (sorry, special military operation), the threat of nuclear war if the west put boots on the ground. But I can't help imagining that if they did actually launch a nuclear weapon it would probably turn out to not work because some colonel at some point in the last decade or so nicked some of the microchips and flogged them to some dodgy African militia. It sounds a joke but this is one of the reasons they've struggled to deploy their most modern tanks. A lot of key parts have been lost to pilferage. Apparently, so desperate for parts are they, that they've been harvesting parts from old household appliances. This was uncovered when inspections of some of the shells they've been lobbing across have been found to contain bits of old washing machine.