That’s jogging for you

A year ago almost to the day, the Russian sub Krasnodar fired a cruise missile that killed 27 civilians in the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa.

The sub commander, Capt. Stanislav Rzhitsky, has since retired. He got a sinecure job in the council of the city after which his submarine was named and looked forward to a long life in mufti.

Yet, unlike people shot point-blank, old habits die hard. As befits a naval officer, Capt. Rzhitsky kept himself fit by going on obligatory morning jogs, rain or shine. And, as befits a modern naval officer, he kept abreast of recent advances in electronics.

Used as he was to daily routine, Capt. Rzhitsky never varied his running route and used a sophisticated American app to track his progress. That proved to be his undoing.

A hitman could prepare for his mission at leisure. By logging in on the same app, he knew exactly what route Capt. Rzhitsky would take and was able to reconnoitre it. He found a spot not covered by CCTV cameras and yesterday morning killed Rzhitsky with four 9mm bullets in the back. Happy anniversary of that missile launch, Stanislav!

One camera did manage to catch the assailant, producing a blurry image of a middle-aged man wearing a turquoise cap. That narrowed it down a lot. The Russian police are now looking for a middle-aged man who by now must have ditched his distinctive cap. Best of luck to them – such airtight identification is bound to bring the sword of justice down on the assassin’s head.

Different morals can be drawn from this incident, but the one springing to my mind on the spur of the moment involved jogging. You see, I have complex feelings about it, not all of them praise-worthy.

I’ve only ever attempted it once, almost 50 years ago, in Houston, Texas. As a competitive tennis player, I felt duty-bound to hone my fitness to razor sharpness. One had to be in pretty good shape to play in Houston’s infernal conditions, with the temperature seldom dropping below 95 degrees and humidity below 95 per cent.

One morning, I manfully ran a mile in some six minutes, which exertion both exhausted and bored me to such an extent that I’ve never tried it again since. Illogically, I began to resent joggers whom I both envied for their perseverance and despised for being only marginally less sanctimonious than cyclists (I told you my feelings were complex).

In that pre-Christian period of my life, I even harassed joggers, especially those who had Walkman earpieces grafted into their heads. If I espied one of them running along the road I was driving on, I’d shift into neutral, roll noiselessly behind him and simultaneously rev up the engine and hit the horn.

That way I dropped some of them into the gutter and made all of them rather irate. One chap even tried to chase me on foot, but he didn’t stand much of a chance against an 8-cylinder engine.

During the same pre-Christian period I experienced intense schadenfreude when Jim Fixx, the guru and populariser of that objectionable activity, keeled over in mid-stride and died at 52. Jogging kills, I thought then and again today, when reading about Capt. Rzhitsky’s demise.

That wasn’t the only thought though. One also has to consider the moral issues involved, such as one of criminal responsibility for carrying out criminal orders.

The so-called Nuremberg defence didn’t work at the eponymous trial in 1946, and it didn’t work for Eichmann in 1962. That established a legal precedent that applies to Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine.

Any military man who kills, rapes, tortures or robs civilians is criminally culpable even if he acts on specific orders from his superiors. Neither does the intent defence quite work.

If tried by due process, Capt. Rzhitsky would probably claim he didn’t mean to kill civilians (some of them children). The missile he fired was aimed at a military target, but veered off course or malfunctioned. So sorry and all that, but that unfortunate accident just couldn’t be helped.

If experts in rocketry and ballistics had subjected that claim to a painstaking forensic analysis, they might have agreed. That would have diminished the officer’s culpability, but it wouldn’t have expunged it.

One could argue persuasively that any participant in a collective war crime bears individual responsibility for any specific crimes committed. On that logic, Capt. Rzhitsky was guilty not only of his murder of 27 civilians, but also of all the massacres committed in Bucha and Melitopol, of every bombing of civilians – some of it deliberate, all of it indiscriminate – throughout the Ukraine, from Lvov to Kiev to Kharkov.

There is no doubt in my mind that Capt. Rzhitsky deserved punishment, probably of the capital variety. But is assassination the best way of administering it?

It’s not. It just happens to be the only way the Ukraine could get justice. It would be more civilised to put thousands of Russians in the dock, which is what happened to thousands of Germans at the end of the Second World War.

Yet for such due process to take place, Russia would have to be defeated and occupied, the way Germany was. Such an outcome, though eminently desirable, simply isn’t on the cards.

Just driving the Russians back to the 1991 borders would constitute a resounding victory for the Ukraine, sending all those war criminals running back into Russia, tail between the legs.

Once there, however, they’d never be extradited in a million years. Hence, assuming the assassination was commissioned by the Ukrainian secret services, their choice wasn’t between rough and legal justice. It was between rough justice and none.

I have no tears to shed for Capt. Rzhitsky – my lachrymose reservoir has been depleted by the pictures of murdered Ukrainian children and their grieving parents. Rzhitsky got what he deserved. He jogged his last.