The world is outraged by the photos and videos form the town of Bucha near Ukraninan capital Kiev. The Ukranian side, western governments and mainstream news agencies are saying that Russian forces brutally killed there hundreds of the Ukranian civillians. Russia denies the accusations. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov called them an “information attack”. Russia requested an urgent UN Security Council meeting on this issue, but the request was twicely declined by the United Kingdom which holds the presidency of the UN Security Council in April.
Despite the fact that no independent investigation has yet been conducted, U.S. President Joe Biden rushed to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling him a war criminal. Leaders of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and other European countries did the same, immediately after the video of the murdered people appeared on the Internet.
Inconsistencies in the Ukrainian version
We are in the midst of informational warfare, where nobody can be really neutral, because his or her impressions and analysys are formed by the information flows he or she is connected to. However the information coverage of the western media lacks the major details hat seriously challenge the western narrative about the ugly Russians who kill everibody because they just want to kill.
Russian troops left Bucha in March 30, after the talks between Russian and Ukraninan sides in Istambul, where Russian side announced the willingnes to diffuse the situation near Ukranian capital. In the four days since the Russian military left Bucha, there has not been a single sign of atrocities, not a single mention of them in the media. On March 31 Bucha Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk, shot a video about the Russian military leaving the city. He say nothing about the streets being strewn with corpses. Photographer Konstantin Liberov was in the city of Bucha (Kyiv region of Ukraine) on April 1 and 2. While shooting a video and talking about the city, he does not mention anything about the corpses of local residents. The man was there as a volunteer. In his story, the photographer never once mentioned the corpses in Bucha. He also did not see any bodies in his numerous videos. However, he toured the entire city.
On April 2, the National Police of Ukraine entered the city. There is a long video of them clearing the city on the Internet. There are only no bodies scattered around the city exept one Russian soldier killed.
However as soon as the Ukrainian army enters the city, the corpses suddenly appears.
On the same day (April 2), units of the Kiev Territorial Defense enter Bucha from another direction – for a clean up operation. Among them was a detachment of a Botsman — prominent Russian neo-Nazi Serghei Korotkih, who escaped Russian justice in Ukraine. Their video footage shows one of the fighters asking, “Those guys over there without the blue armbands, can we shoot at them?” “You bet!” – happily answers the other.
On the footage from the 3 April we see people killed with the white armbands. It was a distinguishing mark of Russian armed forces (as blue armbands for the Ukraninans). The civilians in the territories controlled by the Russians also were wearing them. You can put two things together and draw a conclusion that some people showed may be killed (intentionally or unintentionaly) by Ukranian forces during clean up operation. Also it’s clear from the blood and not stiff bodies in many footages that they weren’t murdered on March 30 but later.
No footage clearly shows who actually kill the people (and if those will appear lately it will be clear sight that they are staged), maybe we see victims of of shelling, whose corpses were used for provocation, maybe the people were killed during the clean up operation, maybe there are people who had supported Russia and after the town was lost were killed by the Ukrainian nationalists. We know that there is a real witch hunt in Ukrainian-controlled cities, where alleged “saboteurs” and “looters” are arrested, beaten, and tied to poles in the streets. The Ukrainian military themselves distribute videos of them killing Russian prisoners, including those tied up. In the same way, they may have massacred those suspected of collaborating with the Russian troops in Bucha. The Ukranian militaries ans secret services have such experience: On 5 March, the Ukrainian media reported that the Security Service of Ukraine had killed Denys Kireyev, a member of the Ukrainian delegation to the negotiations with Russia. Kireyev was suspected of treason and was killed by the Security Service of Ukraine. Earlier, the mayor of the town of Kreminna, Volodymyr Struk, was kidnapped and killed. Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, endorsed the murder, saying it was carried out by “unknown patriots.”
There is no compelling evidence that there war crime was commit (and not staged with the use of corpses of the people incidentally killed before) and if it was really commit that Russia is responsible. Ukrainian nationalists have never felt pity for their own citizens, and it was they who killed 14,000 people in the Donbass, where mass graves of their victims are still found to this day. It is the Ukrainians who are now using civilians as hostages in Mariupol. It was the Ukrainian nationalists who mercilessly exterminated Ukrainians, Poles, Jews and Russians in the 1940s collaborating with Nazi Germany and 1950s in coordination with the British and American secret services. The Ukrainian armed forces are suffering heavy losses in manpower and equipment and are willing to do anything to get more support from Western countries.
Another reasons for the provocation: to hide , to cover the facts that Ukranian troops were torturing and killing Russian prisoners of war. The sadistic videos caused outrage in Russia, but were never shown in the West
Western footprints
In the provocation in Bucha there is a Western trace. On April 3, Human Rights Watch (HRW) was the first organization that rushed to accuse Russia.
Also there can not be trust to the HRW which the first rushed to blame Russia. It is a part of the Western propagandist machine, funded by Jorge Soros, used to hire former US government officials and was recently encouraged by the Antony Blincen to promote democracy in Ukraine and Russia. This organization is totally biased and not trustworthy. Ken Roth, the director of HRW, supported the far-right military coup in Bolivia in November 2019, back in 2011, the HRW director wrote an op-ed glorifying the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, justifying the US military operations abroad, “Roth helped justify the Trump administration’s extrajudicial execution of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani”, likened China to Nazi Germany and spread “a fake video of a special effects training which he implied depicted Chinese “killer robots.”, says Ben Norton from Grayzone.
Iraq War architect Colin Powell called human rights NGOs “force multipliers” for the U.S. military, calling them “an important part of our combat team.” The Western elites understand that Russia fights against not Ukraine as such but against the unipolar world and Wester hegemony and it is why the West will use all means to stop Russia.
We witnessed the same pattern in Yugoslavia, Syria and Libya where the West accused the leaders they wanted to overthrow in crimes against humanity. The new war or strikes followed these provocations, so we should expect the more deep involvement of NATO in Ukrainian crisis that may lead to disastrous consequences when the war will spill over the current warzone. We should also expect more provocations, including accusations of the use of chemical weapons, as was the case in Syria.
Remember the role of the UK-linked White Helmets in coverage of Syrian war in western media and see now that it is the UK which refused to discuss the Russian position on Bucha at the UN Security Council. It is already thought-provoking.
Instead of an independent commission, the U.S. is ready to send its experts to Bucha and is supporting an “international team of prosecutors and experts to collect and analyse evidence of atrocities”. This clearly shows that the US and its allies are not interested in an independent investigation of what really happened in Bucha. Instead of independent investigation the world public opinion will be fed with information from Americans, Ukrainians, investigators from Bellingcat and other similar structures, which are financed from the NATO countries funds. However, even the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine was established by the US initiative and will support the narrative of their sponsors.
Syria and Yugoslavia: the experience of provocations
In the past in Syria (Douma incident of 2018) the evidence of these investigation teams was no so evident and even debunked by the independent analysts and the documents leaked showed that some of evidence that did not confirm the mainstream version (evil Assad) were neglected. However before that the US, the UK and France bombed Syria blaming Assad in chemical attack. In July 2018 Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued a report that supported the western version of what had happened in Douma.
Only a year later OPCW expert Ian Henderson who was member of the investigation team sent by the OPCW exposed the truth saying that the July 2018 OPCW report on the Duma incident was contradictory and “contrary to the consensus that had been reached within the team.” According to him, there was no chemical attack in the city of Douma.
Another example where the Western media misled their own and the world’s public is Yugoslavia in 1999. Then the Serbs were accused of killing 45 Albanian civilians in the Kosovo village of Racak. The whole story of the massacre was presented as an obvious and unproven war crime by the Serbian army. The Serbs denied the shootings, and, in turn, pointed out that those killed were members of the Kosovo Liberation Army who had died in combat. The Serbs agreed to an international investigation of the incident, on the reasonable condition that the experts should be neutral: not from NATO member states. The Racak episode was the reason for the start of the bombing of Yugoslavia and the humanitarian intervention in the country. In 2006, the Racak episode was removed by prosecutors from the list of crimes considered by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
What’s next?
An independent commission is needed to fully investigate what happened in Bucha. However, it is impossible under the current circumstances. As Russian geopolitical philosopher Alexander Dugin notes:
“When the army leaves the territory it had previously seized, there is inevitably a ‘Bucha’. Whoever controls the territory proves whatever he wants on it. And then there is the question of the scale of the mass media campaign”.
The Western media use the Bucha provocation to demonize Russia and dehumanize the Russians. Such an approach expands the scope of acceptable solutions with respect to Russia up to a trade blockade and even the initiation of military action on its territory (Kaliningrad region as the most possible location). Undoubtedly, there will be more provocations ahead, including, possibly, chemical weapons on Ukrainian territory. These may be followed by new steps toward escalation, including the unleashing of a nuclear war. Hypocritical statements of humanism by the West always conceal a desire to start a new aggression.