Our view: What to do when the Russians are coming?

Ukraine crisis

Ukrainian servicemen stand by a deactivated Russian military multiple rocket launcher on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine. Picture: AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda

In his extraordinary, hallucinatory, Holocaust novel The Kindly Ones, author Jonathan Littell asks what it is that turns ordinary people into mass killers.

Much of the narrative of that powerful and controversial book, seen through the eyes of a Nazi SS officer in an Einsatzgruppen extermination squad, is set in Ukraine. Some of its most gruelling descriptions are located at a site called Babi Yar where 34,000 Jews were murdered in two days.