Every army committed crimes against civilians, sadly, but the Soviets took that seriously enough to punish rapists with the death penalty. Other armies, like the Nazis, US, Japanese, etc did not punish their rapists to the same degree so as to serve as a deterrent.

Further, the Nazi propagandists used the facts of ethnic asians in the Red Army to propagandize about "mongol hordes coming to rape everyone," which is of course racist, but nevertheless was enough to create the myth of the Red Army as exceptionally brutal as compared to the other armies.

[+] crazyhotpasta@lemmy.world -2 points 2 days ago (3 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

We were talking about the Red Army, not the Russian millitary in general. Is your point that sexual assault is genetic to Russians, or are you under the impression that Russia is still Socialist? The former would be racist, the latter would be a critical misunderstanding of Russian history.

Further, again, all armies commit assaults. This does not make any excess acceptable whatsoever, but it does mean we need to look at what the armies do internally to suppress it. We can see that the Ukrainian army is also guilty of sexual assault:

Amnesty International accessed the government-controlled territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions between January and November 2019. The organisation has had no access to the separatist-controlled areas, which fall beyond the scope of the report.

Official statistics on domestic violence, however unreliable and incomplete, show a spike of registered cases in the last three years. In 2018, there was a 76% increase in reported cases in Donetsk region and a 158% increase in Luhansk region, compared to the average of the previous three years.

Source: Amnesty International

Even before Russia got directly involved, the Ukrainian army was sexually assaulting the ethnic Russians in the Donbass region as they were shelling the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics.