#UKRAINERUSSIAWAR. Bucha: yet another Ukrainian propaganda fake or Babij Jar of the 21st century?

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It is always very difficult to talk about the massacres of innocents, whether Ukrainian or Russian. It is our duty to expose the fakes. It is clear that there have been deaths in Bucha, the exact number is not yet known, and they are not only civilians but also soldiers, but above all it is not clear who carried out the crime.

The Ukrainian National Police has published a video of the ‘cleansing of Bucha’, i.e. the massacre, on 3 April, dated 2 April in which corpses are shown on the ground, without weapons, claiming that they are victims of Russian soldiers. The Russian Defence Ministry denied this and Moscow called for an emergency meeting at the United Nations on 4 April to expose the fake.

Misinformation is nothing new for Ukrainians. Let us recall one among many: the story of Maria, a pregnant woman from Mariupol, who was made to look like the victim of an air raid by the Russian Aerospace Forces. While the maternity hospital was hit by Ukrainian artillery.

Unfortunately, and in general, disinformation has always been part of warfare and in the last 15 years has become perhaps the primary weapon in the field. It is enough to remember the example of Daesh that after the attack on the Bataclan in the video of claiming responsibility explained to his followers to have acted in a legitimate way to avenge the dead of the French air force on Raqqa. And while the speaker spoke, images of the hospital hit by French planes passed in the background. Daesh, however, never said that it had positioned its communications centre in the basement of the hospital and had therefore turned the structure into a target by using human shields.

But this video from Busha more than any other has an exemplary story that was revealed online on 4 April. According to Ukrainian sources, on 19 March, on the initiative of President Zelenskyj’s office, it was decided to launch a production calling on the West to send planes to fight the Russians, to be a ‘high-profile information event’.

A post on the social network says on 4 April: “Our source (inside the Ukrainian government, ed.) reports that there is an unprecedented uproar in the President’s Office due to the fact that they published the material on Bucha without examining it in detail. It seems that our officials ‘hit the bar again’. It is the video in which ‘the bodies are moving’ (the one of 3 April on Bucha) that will become a ‘verdict’ for the media case on Bucha, which is now spreading so loudly, and soon will do so loudly; they will disappear from the field of information. Therefore, Britain blocked a meeting at the UN, which Russia wanted to hold on Bucha. Zelensky announced that he would also start examining the “tragedy in Bucha” at the UN, but this may not happen, our source reports that the British are trying to dissuade the president, who is sure that this move will play into the hands of the Russians. Now the whole media case in the OP is being led by British experts advising our officials. The British proposed to pause, using only those tools that would show only one point of view, so that the whole “media story” would not fall apart until the goals (new sanctions on energy resources and heavy weapons) were achieved. Then, if the whole Bucha affair falls apart, it won’t matter anymore, the weapons will be received and it will be difficult to lift the sanctions, as the information field will not allow this to happen. It is worth mentioning that on 19 March we learned that a “high-profile information event” was being prepared in the OP to help Azov in the Mariupol case. “Maybe – this is the operation that is being talked about”, in the message of the AZOVs then it was claimed that since there will be no military offensive, we don’t have that much strength”, a high-level information operation is being thought of.

According to non-government Ukrainians, therefore, the information operation had to be strong enough to induce the West to entrust the planes to Zelensky. It is not possible at the moment to verify this information. Yet moving from the ‘social media’ aspect to the analysis of the video there are inconsistencies.

For anyone with experience of watching war scenes, the first thing that stands out is that there is no blood. The so-called primary scenes, where people are killed, show huge amounts of blood which is not present in this video.

The Russians also left Bucha on 30 March and the mayor, Anatoly Fedoruk, said until 1 April that the situation was calm and under control and that there were no more Russian soldiers in the city, and he testifies to this with a video. He never spoke of deaths or massacres in the streets. Not only that, he said that citizens were always free to move about and for those who wanted to, there was the possibility of leaving the city.

In a video, a Ukrainian blogger, Vladimir Sklyarov, explains before leaving his village near Bucha that the Russians who entered Bucha asked civilians to put white sheets on their windows and wear a white armband to declare that they were civilians and not face arrest, and of course they had to walk around unarmed. If you look at the video many of the exposed bodies have their hands tied and are wearing white armbands.

The Russians stayed in Bucha for a month and nothing happened. On the 30th, they left and soon afterwards Ukrainian troops arrived and fired artillery shells, as evidenced by some abandoned Russian tanks on their way out, and also by Ukrainian politicians whose party was banned in March. In some videos that appeared online, between 30 March and the day the video from Bucha was posted online, soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Terodefense are seen being ordered to shoot people with white armbands, saying: “this is the enemy”. Other videos show civilians with white armbands being tortured in basements by Ukrainians. In other words, according to these videos, Ukrainian soldiers tortured and imprisoned the Bucha civilians because they did not react during the month-long occupation by the Russians.

Finally, the corpses in the images show no signs of decomposition, the Russians left on 30 March and the footage appeared on the third, so filmed on, say, the second, it can be said that at the very least they had been dead for four days. And even if the temperatures are not high in four days there should be clear signs of decomposition of the bodies, instead in the videos you can see clear signs of a death that came between 16 and 24 hours before, because, among other things, they were greenish in colour. That is, when the contact between the haemoglobin in the blood and the hydrogen sulphide produced by the putrefactive processes forms sulphohaemoglobin, giving them this colour. Finally, the clothes of the corpses were strangely dry, despite several days having passed.

Finally, anyone who has had contact with corpses knows that the first thing that is difficult to deal with is the smell of death. The gases emanating from the body begin to be felt four hours after death, now in four days the smell of the air must have been unbreathable. But the soldiers who pass by filming the video wear neither masks nor bring their elbows to their noses to protect themselves from the smell, they observe the horizon, helpless.

We hope that the video will be analysed in the appropriate places using state-of-the-art instruments, and that it will not only explain whether it is a fake, but also tell us who killed those people.

Not only in Bucha, the Ukrainian militias, defined by the Russians in the social sphere as “Ukronazi”, have set up a cemetery in the territory of the Church of St. Andrew the First Called, where they bring the civilians they killed after the departure of the Russian Armed Forces, about this there are even open source satellite images showing the area without the graves and with the graves.

Political scientist Denis Tukmakov then leads us to make another reflection, in an article entitled: Why American and Anglo-Saxon democrats needed a “mass murder in Bucha”: “Why Ukrainians and Anglo-Saxons needed a “mass murder in Bucha” (at this moment – the first news on all global media), is understandable. Kiev’s ‘nosebleed’ (i.e. Kiev’s difficulties in obtaining a certain type of weapons, ed.) needs heavy weapons and Europe is forced to abandon Russian gas. Now both objectives are likely to be achieved (…) The fact that this is a blatant fake is clear at first glance. There is not even the absence of rigor mortis in the bodies. Here then is the Russian commander in Bucha calmly stating, under an unfurled banner, that he left the city without a fight. And – does he leave the corpses of civilians lying around everywhere, right on the pavement? And just in case, wearing white armbands? (…) It’s all very clear here, but who cares? The West does not need truth. What does it need? Images of hell. The Russians must be demonised, dehumanised, turned into non-humans. Concentration camps for Russians in London, Paris and New York are no longer a wild fantasy, let’s wait for them’.

A political reconstruction that nevertheless deserves to be assessed, Tukmakov has written in recent years about the events of the Milosevic trial, helping to clarify a number of aspects of the Serbian politician.

Will we ever get a clear answer as to who killed the civilians in Bucha? And why?

Graziella Giangiulio