This scenario already played out before in history; some people may believe those groups to have been heroes, but most can recognize that fighting in the name of independence did not make those groups any less guilty of committing atrocities against civilians. At the same time, that doesn't take away today from the people fighting for freedom legitimately. If anything, those groups hurt their cause in the long-run, as they gave Russia ammunition for propaganda for the next 80+ years.
Just curious what does fighting for freedom legitimately look like in this context for you?
> For Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, the colonizer's presence in Algeria is based on sheer military strength. Any resistance to this strength must also be of a violent nature because it is the only "language" the colonizer speaks. [1]
Partisans were kinda notorious for their actions against civilians - sometimes to punish collaborators (although in practice it would often be the entire village deemed collectively responsible if e.g. some partisans were betrayed there, and burned down), but often just targeting the infrastructure to deny it to the Germans even if that meant that civilians would starve to death etc. Here's one famous partisan hero-martyr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoya_Kosmodemyanskaya
I'm not aware of any "resistance groups" fighting the Nazis that created horrors of this kind - though the Soviet army itself probably did. In my opinion, what distinguishes these kinds of massacres is their utter meaninglessness; they serve no military purpose, they are usually even detrimental to military goals. Going door to door killing does nothing to advance a cause - it is purely an expression of hate.
