As I read the dispiriting Talking Point ‘Russia and the crisis in Syria’ (October 13) by Russia’s ambassador to Malta, Vladimir Malygin, I could not help being reminded of a 17th century English diplomat’s wry comment that: “An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country.” I know the feeling Mr Ambassador. We’ve all had to do it.

But that does not make what Malygin wrote any more acceptable. As European Union foreign ministers have rightly stated “the deliberate targeting of hospitals, medical personnel, schools and essential infrastructure in Aleppo with barrel bombs and chemical weapons may amount to a war crime”. No amount of obfuscation by the ambassador can disguise it. The scale of the destruction unleashed by the Syrian government’s Russian-backed offensive has horrified even Moscow’s long-time backers in Athens, Budapest and Nicosia.

In the business of bombing, President Vladimir Putin has form. He is pursuing total military victory in Aleppo in the same way and with the same ruthless determination as he achieved in Chechnya 16 years ago in the destruction of Grozny – a destruction, until now, without parallel since the end of World War II.

In Aleppo, Putin is not merely saving the Assad regime. He is also projecting naked power when Russian prestige appears to warrant it.

The campaign tactics in Aleppo have their origins in the siege and assault on the Chechen capital, Grozny, in 1999/2000 when Putin was still the Prime Minister of Russia. The fighting left the capital devastated after Russian forces subjected the entrenched but outnumbered and outgunned Chechens to an intensive heavy artillery barrage and aerial bombardment consisting of ballistic missiles and fuel air explosives. Air strikes were also used to attack civilians hiding in basements. Sounds familiar?

But the historical analogy goes back even further. The Assad regime, steered by the Russians, is doing to Aleppo precisely what Franco and the Nazis did at Guernica in the Spanish Civil War 80 years ago. Just as the Nazis destroyed the Basque city in 1937 on behalf of Franco’s Nationalists, so Putin’s Russian bombers are helping to pummel and kill Aleppo’s citizens in support of the Assad regime.

Hitler’s regime had deployed the latest technology to destroy a city in another country’s civil war. And now Putin is doing the same in Syria, through a systematic bombing campaign to terrorise civilians. The Nazis pounded Guernica with high-explosive bombs followed by at least 3,000 incendiary bombs to burn the smashed wooden ruins and ignite a firestorm.

When asked about the Spanish Civil War at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, Hermann Goering, Hitler’s chief of the Luftwaffe, described it as “an opportunity to test under fire whether material has been adequately developed”.

Despite the ambassador’s protestations, the Russian and Syrian assault on Aleppo is a war crime

The parallels with Syria today are uncanny. Although it was clear that the Germans were responsible in Guernica, Hitler denied responsibility (as Russia has attempted to do). Russian aircraft are reported to be dropping huge “bunker buster” bombs and cluster bombs. Human Rights Watch has cited “compelling evidence” that Russia is also deploying incendiary bombs despite being a signatory to the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons that ban the use of firebombs on areas with civilian concentrations, as in Aleppo.

The Russian ambassador insists that Russia is targeting terrorists and not civilians. But there is clear evidence that Russian and Syrian aircraft have been targeting hospitals and humanitarian convoys. Human rights organisations calculate that 95 per cent of civilian deaths in Aleppo have been caused by Russian and Syrian government planes. Russian aircraft instil even greater terror in the civilian population than those of Assad, since they fly so high they cannot be heard before the bombs start falling.

The relentless aerial bombardment echoes the terrifying methods reported by a first-hand witness at Guernica: “Heavy bombs to stampede the population, then heavy and incendiary bombs to wreck the houses and burn them on top of their victims.”

Despite the ambassador’s protestations, the Russian and Syrian assault on Aleppo is plainly a war crime. But like the Nazi Condor Legion forces that razed Guernica to the ground and inspired Picasso’s great, cubist painting, Guernica – a twisted, distorted nightmarish vision of what happens to the minds and bodies of defenceless human beings when bombs are rained remorselessly on them in a bloodstained man-made horror - the perpetrators are likely to vanish unprosecuted into history.

Evidence being collected by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability and other organisations points clearly to the deliberate targeting of civilians, hospitals and aid convoys by Russian and Syrian aircraft. All are war crimes, as President Hollande of France rightly pointed out a fortnight ago. War crimes have no statute of limitations. Neither Assad, nor even Putin, can remain in power indefinitely. The more they bomb, the longer the indictments drawn up against them by international prosecutors are likely to grow.

Aleppo, like Guernica 80 years ago, is a strategic trading hub reduced to little more than rubble by an air force put at the disposal of one authoritarian and tyrannical leader by another. Putin and Assad may scorn the minimal western resistance to their operations, as Hitler and Franco scorned Europe’s appeasers of the 1930s. But they should note where the long struggle against 20th century Fascism ended: in Nuremberg.

Once a world heritage site and a city of two million people, Aleppo is now a monument to high explosive. The atrocity unfolding in what was once Syria’s biggest city ranks with the worst of the past century. Its besieged eastern half is now home to about 250,000 men, women and children with dwindling food and medical supplies and a total of just 30 doctors to care for them when the bombs fall.

Some will have been jihadist fighters who provide the pretext for this destruction, as the Russian ambassador claims. But many, as the harrowing film footage shows, are children. Assad’s and Putin’s weapons of choice are heavy artillery and barrel bombs dropped from helicopters with high-flying Russian jets dropping cluster bombs, bunker-busters to penetrate deep into underground shelters as well as destroying the remaining infrastructure and - in another echo of Guernica - incendiary devices.

President Putin has made a mockery of international law and the United Nations Security Council, where Russia has vetoed resolutions calling for restraint in Syria five times in five years. Despite the latest halt of airstrikes by Russia and Syria on the besieged city of Aleppo, this is only a temporary pause, pending the arrival very shortly into the Syrian conflict zone of the largest Russian surface naval deployment since the end of the Cold War.

Russia is about to throw all its military weight against eastern Aleppo to secure the whole city for the Assad regimeafter a short, fierce and fiery aerial and naval bombardment.

The ultimate Russian objective – as it was in Grozny 16 years ago – is the total elimination of resistance in Aleppo by all means possible, including the slaughter of innocent civilian men, women and children, and the total destruction of this former world heritage city. The Assad regime, aided and abetted by Russian military power, is merciless in pursuit of its objectives and is breaking international military law to achieve them.

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