***Sorry for bad english. I love reddit and recently found this subreddit. Hello, I served in the Russian army in 1994-1995 then was discharged. I served in Chechnya when I was 20 years old. I currently live in the United States. My dad served in the army, and his dad before him, and his dad before him etc, so I figured it was natural to join.
In Chechnya though, it was very different. The entire city, civilians inside were bombarded day and night for over a week. I am not talking targeted drone strikes, but mass bombings, hundreds of shells and strikes on civilians and apartments and crowded areas. I did not take part in that, but I was apart of an infantry division which entered the city. We were mostly on the outskirts of the city, and we encountered heavy resistance. Almost right away I regretted joining, but I still had the instincts to continue following orders and serving. My group of men killed most of the enemies we encountered. The first day or two of fighting we saw intense resistance, but not as bad as some other groups. I don't really know if I directly killed anyone at this point, I was mostly just firing my gun at enemy positions alongside dozens of men, none of us could truly know which of our bullets was the one to land. When we finally entered the more populated areas we had so, so many situations where civilians were killed left and right. In one situation we saw 8 people sprint across a street and we mowed them down, turns out they were just a family running from an apartment. We shot at any faces which appeared near windows, almost all of them civilians. In one instance we knew there were hostiles in an apartment building, so we just unloaded all our firepower into the building. When we finally cleared it out, there were dozens of civilians killed inside, many more wounded. We found just two men with guns inside. Two men firing at us from a distance ended up with dozens upon dozens of civilians killed. We had a sniper kill two of our men, and that enraged me, along with the other men, to the point where it numbed our killing of civilians after. It was just a constant flurry of shooting anything that moved, anything in sight. I would guess we killed 15 civilians per enemy soldier. Include the bombings in that (everything was rubble, the entire city was rubble) and it was likely 50 civilians per enemy soldier. And the soldiers I was with would often laugh about it, and I laughed with them at the time because I didn't want to seem weird. Many of them were older, much older, some had served in Afghanistan. I remember at night one guy would tell us stories from Afghanistan of him killing civilians with a machine gun close range, just killing them from a helicopter, and everyone cheered him on.
I started drinking a huge amount in the days after, just blackout drunk for most of my shifts. It was very much the same after, except the civilians got less common as more people fled. I got a shot to the leg, and was discharged (not sure if that is the right term?) right after from the fighting. Basically let go from the fighting, I was sent home after I healed and had to go through intense therapy for my leg for nearly a year.
I was only there for 13 days of fighting and I saw things I never want to see again. Perhaps if they were germans like my grandfather fought I could be happier. I never realized what it was actually like to fight like that, I thought we would be fighting soldiers entirely, but I had no idea it was mostly going to be innocent people dying. I suppose I always knew that that would happen, but not like that. Never like that. The worst part was that it all felt inevitable, it all felt necessary. What were we supposed to do? We had so many instances as well where we let something go, like someone running across the street fast, because we thought they were a civilian, then they opened fire on us and shot us. So we just had no idea who was a civilian and who was not, we had to make constant calls of judgement, and after a day, especially after the sniper incident, every call of judgement we had was to open fire as soon as possible, not make any acts of mercy on the off chance it was a civilian. I kept on thinking "WHY ARE YOU HERE! YOU WOULDN'T BE DEAD IF YOU DIDN'T MAKE SUCH STUPID DECISIONS!" and I used that line of thinking to make me feel better about it. It all feels so stupid to have thought that way. There was no real excuse for it.
I just wish that something like that never has to happen ever again, or that we had better systems in place to make it so we didn't have to kill innocent people. I know that American soldiers didn't kill anywhere near that many civilians when they took over Baghdad in 2003, a city 5 times the amount of Grozny. So what did they have in place to protect that?
I suppose I never really thought about the war or conflict for years after except at nighttime. I went to a veteran support group in the USA but I felt entirely different because the USA soldiers had entirely different experiences than I did and I was Russian and not American. Recently I watched a movie called Children of Men and the ending scene in the refugee camp was so similar visually and audio to my experience in Chechnya that it just broke me entirely and since then I cannot stop thinking about my experience there, after years of not thinking about it, its suddenly constantly in my mind after seeing that movie.***
You have just confessed to war crimes against civilians. If you have become a permanent legal resident or citizen of the United States, you would have been asked about situations like this. Did you inform USCIS that "In one situation we saw 8 people sprint across a street and we mowed them down, turns out they were just a family running from an apartment. We shot at any faces which appeared near windows, almost all of them civilians".
Frankly, I don't care what your reasons were. You committed war crimes. As someone who also served in the military, there is no lawful reason for what you have done.