The uncovering — and confirmation, via satellite imagery — of murdered civilians on the streets of Bucha, Ukraine is a grim reminder of the dismal nature of war, and sometimes man.
As Russian forces made their embarrassing retreat from the region around Kyiv, Ukraine troops marched back into cities like Bucha that had been under Russian control for weeks.
What was found there isn’t easy to see, or even just to discuss.
I was hesitant at first to write about the massacre in Bucha because wartime atrocities can be difficult to prove — and easy to fake for propaganda purposes.
What they found in Bucha was like a scene from Nazi-occupied Poland or Bosnia during their ethnoreligious civil war.
Both sides of any conflict seek to shape world opinion through the use of propaganda, and this Russian invasion of Ukraine is no different. For that reason, I’ve tried to mostly ignore the most egregious claims made by both Moscow and Ukraine.
But there’s no denying the horror of Bucha, where the bodies found on the streets — shot, some with their wrists bound — on April 1, can be seen in satellite images taken during the Russian occupation.
Or, if you’ll allow me to be blunt, what Soviet Russian forces did to 20,000 Polish prisoners in the Katyn Forest and other places in 1940.
Then there are stories of military murder like this one, told while the body is being placed in a body bag.
Witness. Bucha.
English subtitles pic.twitter.com/VZDXlxZr0w— Nikola Repin (@nikorepi) April 5, 2022
The most recent estimate is that there are up to 300 bodies in Bucha’s mass grave.
Russian authorities claimed that Ukrainian soldiers had slaughtered their own people or that the horrific scene had been staged.
(Make up your minds, fellas.)
What has been confirmed in Bucha ought to shock you, but it shouldn’t surprise you. Similar atrocities, even though usually on a much smaller scale, have been caught on video since the very start of the Russian invasion.
Also this week, the mayor of Motyzhyn, her husband, and their son were murdered while held captive — kidnapped, that is — by Russian forces.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk claims that up to 11 mayors and community heads are now in Russian captivity.
There are also numerous reports of hundreds or even thousands of Ukrainians from occupied areas being removed to Russia.
Moscow denies such claims but has admitted that more than 400,000 people have been “voluntarily” evacuated to Russia.
Volunteers? Refugees? Hostages? Who knows.
None of this is to excuse other atrocities, like Ukrainian soldiers torturing Russian POWs. I’ve never thought highly of Ukraine’s corrupt government, and I’ll think even less of it if crimes like this one go unpunished.
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Again, I’ve been loath to give much credence to reports like these, but mass graves do have a way of focusing the mind.
Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s justification for his “special military operation” against Ukraine was some need to de-Nazify the country.
The operation’s “goal,” Putin said on Russian state television, “is to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide … for the last eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”
Putin was referring to the shelling of separatist enclaves in Ukraine’s Donbas region — enclaves created by pro-Russian forces and supported by Russia.
Well: Start a civil war, get shelled, I always say.
But there’s more to it than that, as Bucha makes clear.
Ukraine wasn’t the aggressor snipping off bits of smaller countries.
That was Russia.
Russia took Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia, more than a little like Hitler taking Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland in 1938. Ditto for snatching Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and encouraging and supplying Russian nationalists in Ukraine’s Donbas.
And, as we learned six weeks ago, Putin had hopes of quickly bringing Ukraine back into Moscow’s tender embrace — somewhat reminiscent of Hitler’s 1938 Anschluss with Austria.
Ukraine didn’t leave mass graves of civilians in Russia. Russia did that to Ukraine.
The time has come for Russian troops to ask themselves: Are we the baddies?
