Member of the State Duma Anatoly Shabad [ru], who was smuggled to the village by Chechen women,[25] compared the Russian troops to Nazi extermination squads: "What happened there was a large-scale punitive operation aimed at destroying the population. There was no organized resistance in Samashki. It was surely planned with the idea to kill as many as possible, in order to achieve a threatening effect."[2][3] The head of the Department of Caucasian Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergei Arutiunov [ru] compared the massacre to that of "Khatyn in Belarus, Lidice in Czechoslovakia" and said that the name Samashki "sounds more sinister than My Lai in Vietnam."[26] The English-language newspaper The Moscow News wrote in an editorial: "What the Russians did in Samashki is what the Germans did to us throughout the war [WWII], but Russians did this to their own people.