This is the second part of a three-part series on ‘the Blob’ that runs American foreign policy. Read part one here.
WASHINGTON – The Russian war on Ukraine has seen ‘the Blob’ reassert itself with a vengeance in the 11 weeks since Russia announced the commencement of hostilities on February 24.
This article will examine the forces shaping President Joe Biden’s approach to the Ukraine crisis, and then move on to explore the state of foreign policy debate, or lack thereof, within Biden’s Democratic Party.
Former high-ranking military officials, intelligence analysts and diplomats who served at various points during the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations paint a picture in recent conversations with Asia Times of the likely policy options being presented to President Biden as he faces the gravest crisis on the European continent since the Second World War.
The past month has seen the Biden administration, by fits and starts and then seemingly all at once, adopt a militarized, hardline approach toward Russia, declaring Ukraine’s “victory” over Russia as the only acceptable outcome.
While Biden remains steadfast in assuring the public that there will be no “boots on the ground,” in point of fact, current and former officials have suggested that US paramilitaries are indeed on the ground, with military assistance being coordinated by the new appointee to the Biden National Security Council, retired US Army Lieutenant General Terry Wolff.
According to retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as secretary of state Colin Powell’s chief of staff, the administration is planning for a protracted conflict in Ukraine.
Wilkerson says “they are extremely desirous of a protracted conflict because they want to effect regime change in Moscow, destabilize Russia and then take on China. That is their long-term geopolitical strategy.”
It is helpful here to take a moment to describe the prevailing mindset of the top national security officials closest to Biden.
At the very beginning of Biden’s term, a message was sent loud and clear to both supporters and critics in Washington that it would not tolerate any deviations from the establishment orthodoxy and that the perspective and expertise of outsiders were not welcome.
No fierce challenger of the establishment, Rojansky had been a fixture in track-two level talks between American and Russian political scientists and former government officials.Russia expert Matthew Rojansky’s views are unwanted by the Biden administration. Image: Twitter / Bucknell University
Yet when news leaked that Rojansky was under consideration for an appointment to Biden’s National Security Council (NSC), the knives came out and the Democratic hawks made Rojansky their prey. The appointment was torpedoed – and quickly.
Rojansky is now head of a US-Russia-focused non-profit, far from the corridors of power. That’s worrying because, outside of Central Intelligence Agency director William Burns, deep expertise on Russia is thin on the ground in the Biden administration, according to former and current officials who spoke to Asia Times.
But if Russia expertise is lacking, what the vast majority of Biden’s foreign policy appointments do have are deep connections to the reflexively hawkish and dominant wing of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, and that, in part, explains the trajectory of the administration’s policy in Ukraine.
The evolution of Biden’s policy was described to this correspondent by former ambassador Chas Freeman, now a senior fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University who remains deeply engaged in the foreign policy debate in Washington. Freeman said: “It took about eight weeks for the administration, in the person of NSC Advisor [Jake] Sullivan, to enunciate war aims for the proxy war.
“At the outset of its response to the Russian invasion, the administration was careful to limit possible provocation of the Russians. But, not having seen direct retaliation from Moscow, it has become progressively less cautious.
“This lack of caution is aided by the fact that it is Ukrainians, not Americans, who are dying and by the success of pro-Ukrainian propaganda and the effective Western ban on contradictory information from non-Ukrainian sources. There is a risk that the administration will inhale its own propaganda and underestimate the risks it is taking,” said Freeman.
George Beebe, former head of Russia analysis at the CIA and a senior member of the intelligence service who served on the national security staff of vice president Dick Cheney, agrees.
“It seems to me that the United States and NATO are experiencing the phenomenon of the appetite growing with eating. We didn’t expect the Ukrainians to be as successful as they proved to be,” Beebe said.
Beebe, now the director of the grand strategy program at the Quincy Institute, continued: “A good part of the credit goes to the Ukrainians themselves, their leadership, their courage and fighting against the Russians. A good part of it comes from our own support for them, the intelligence and military assistance that we’ve provided that they’ve used very effectively.
“But I think that has produced battlefield successes that go well beyond anything that the US government expected when Putin launched this invasion. As a result, we started to think, ‘Hey, maybe we can win this.’”Ukrainian soldiers use a launcher with US-made Javelin missiles during military exercises in Donetsk region, Ukraine, on December 23, 2021. Photo: Ukrainian Defense Ministry Press Service
“Our eyes, “ says Beebe, “have grown bigger. You walk around here in Washington and there are very few people that are worried that we might get into an escalation spiral that we can’t control. Seems to me that much of Congress is worried that they might be accused of not doing enough to support Ukraine, not of doing too much that tips us over the edge here into a very dangerous situation. So I think it is fair to say that we are in a much more dangerous situation right now from the point of view of escalation than we’ve been in my lifetime.”
Freeman observes that as a result of the war fever enveloping Washington, “It is now taboo in the United States to inquire into the origins of the war, to suggest that Western policy had any role in provoking it, or that there has been or is any basis for Russia’s security concerns.”
And nowhere is the taboo of raising even the most basic questions about American involvement stronger than on Capitol Hill. Indeed, what the last couple of weeks in Washington has shown is that, with respect to the proxy war the administration has now embarked upon, there is essentially a uni-party on Capitol Hill.
This is thanks in large part to one person: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who rules her caucus – including the so-called “Squad” – with an iron discipline. In some respects, as Beebe pointed out, Congress appears to fear it is not doing enough.
Pelosi is working overtime – and with the full support of the small and now politically neutered progressive caucus – to ensure that the dominant perception is otherwise.
Two landmark pieces of legislation recently signed into law by Biden help tell the tale. Legislation to revive the lend lease program and apply it to Ukraine passed the House on April 28 by a vote of 417 to 10; the 10 opposition votes were all Republicans. Two weeks later, the House passed by a wide margin, 368 to 57, a US$40 billion aid package to Ukraine. Once again, there were no Democratic dissenting votes.
What, then, accounts for Pelosi’s total effectiveness in pushing the war agenda through the House with only token Republican opposition?
A longtime and current Democratic Party insider with ties going back to the Clintons says that Pelosi has become the most effective and feared House Speaker since Sam Rayburn because she is a “Workhorse not a show horse. She understands the substance and policy better than all those folks who just want to hear themselves talk.”
“Don’t ever,” she said, “bet against Nancy Pelosi.”In this file photo taken on October 9, 2021, US Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, speaks to the press on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Photo: AFP / Nicholas Kamm
It helps, too, to control the money. The insider noted that Pelosi’s power comes as much from her legendary indefatigability, showing up at all hours to events large and small to press the flesh and charm the intended marks, as from her access to the high dollar donor base that funds the Democratic party.
In a contest between large dollar donors and small donors such as those who were the lifeblood of the two Bernie Sanders presidential runs, there is no contest.
And in this administration, as with all others, it’s the big donors, like Mr. Biden’s patron, former Comcast CEO David Cohen, who is now his ambassador to Canada, and fundraisers like Jane Hartley, now US ambassador to the United Kingdom, who have the ear of the president and Pelosi.
Pelosi has faced no opposition from her left flank on the massive funding for the war effort, and not simply because progressives are outspent and outnumbered. Progressives have a very weak infrastructure on Capitol Hill when it comes to foreign policy.
As the longtime defense analyst and critic Winslow Wheeler said, “I worked in the Senate and Government Accountability Office for 31 years. I worked for three Republicans and one Democrat. I know the difference between quality staffers and obedient functionaries.”
“Bernie,” says Wheeler, “has a bunch of non-entities on his defense staff. But, on the bright side, at least Elizabeth Warren has Mandy Smithberger, a diamond in the wasteland.”
And so, Biden’s approach to the war is reflective of a kind of “hegemonic multilateralism” that presidents Obama and Clinton practiced, which is basically the pursuit of global hegemony as set out by the infamous 1992 Defense Planning Guidance authored by Paul Wolfowitz and disguised with rhetorical nods to “humanitarianism” and the importance of multilateral international institutions such as the UN.
But there are serious risks in such an approach. Beebe, who has long experience with Russia, says Biden’s wartime policy reflects a zero-sum mentality that is “something that we’ve accused the Russians of, I think with some justification, for many years.”
The idea that whatever weakens Russia and hurts Putin is good for the US, says Beebe, “makes us susceptible to winding up in strategic situations in which our interests are actually hurt. As the Russian conventional military weakens, one of the dangers is that Russia’s dependence on its nuclear arsenal grows.”Russia has threatened to use nuclear arms in retaliation for the West’s support to the Ukrainian resistance. Photo: Getty / Twitter
Freeman’s assessment is equally bleak.
“The US, our NATO allies, Ukraine, and Russia are now locked into long-term hostility. It is entirely possible that the conflict in Ukraine’s east and south, like that between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, will sustain warfare for decades to come. If so, there will be a constant danger of an outbreak of hostilities on Europe’s eastern frontiers and of escalation to direct conflict between Russia and the United States, including a possible nuclear exchange,” he said.
“Given the absence of any serious diplomatic dialogue between Washington and Moscow,” said Freeman, “it is far from obvious how such escalation can be prevented.”
This documentary about the historical context of the 2014 Ukraine war has been banned from YouTube and other venues. I just got around to watching it myself last week. I’m posting it here for those who haven’t seen it yet. For those receiving this via email, I think you’ll have to go to my actual blog to be able to click on and view it.
Late last month, the Joe Biden administration publicly confirmed that a “Disinformation Governing Board” working group had been created within the Department of Homeland Security. The news prompted a flood of concern about the impact of such an Orwellian organ on America.
But there’s no need to engage in hypotheticals to understand the dangers. One has to only consider the past of Nina Jankowicz, the head of the new disinformation board.
Jankowicz’s experience as a disinformation warrior includes her work with StopFake, a US government-funded “anti-disinformation” organization founded in March 2014 and lauded as a model of how to combat Kremlin lies. Four years later, StopFake began aggressively whitewashing two Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups with a long track record of violence, including war crimes.
If the Biden administration is serious about combating threats such as white supremacy, perhaps it should first reflect on the old Roman question: Who will guard the guardians?
StopFake was founded right after Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan uprising ousted the country’s president and swept a new, US-backed government into power. Formed by professors and students from the Kyiv Mohyla Journalism School, StopFake presented itself as a plucky, grassroots group wielding hard facts and semi-permanent smirks as it shredded Russian propaganda. It gained notoriety by producing slick videos hosted by dynamic disinformation warriors debunking the Moscow lies of the day.
Western reporters—and checkbooks—were paying attention. Shortly after its creation, StopFake began receiving funding from Western governments, including the National Endowment for Democracy—an organization mainly funded by the US Congress—and the British embassy in Ukraine. It was also supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. (StopFake has run numerous episodes that cover Soros but fail to disclose this potential conflict of interest—a violation of basic tenets of journalism.)
Among StopFake’s hosts was Jankowicz, a graduate of Bryn Mawr and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service who was already part of the burgeoning disinformation warrior industry while in Ukraine as a Fulbright Clinton Public Policy Fellow. On January 29, 2017, she hosted StopFake Episode 117, whose lead story dealt with a perennial obsession of Russian propaganda: Ukraine’s volunteer battalions.
These are the dozens of paramilitaries formed in 2014 to fight against Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region. From the beginning, Moscow focused on the violent and far-right nature of many of these units.
At the time of Jankowicz’s piece, the Russian press was bristling at Kyiv’s creating a new holiday to honor military volunteers—Moscow commentators depicted this as a celebration of far-right butchers. Jankowicz offered an emphatically different take.
“Volunteer battalions organized throughout the country and they supported weak Ukrainian armed forces and prevented further Russian separatist encroachment. Today the volunteer battalions are part of the official Ukrainian armed forces, overseen by the Defense and Interior Ministries,” she said in her StopFake debunking segment.
“The volunteer movement in Ukraine extends far beyond military service. Volunteer groups are active in supporting Ukraine’s military with food, clothing, medicine, and post-battle rehabilitation, as well as working actively with the nearly two million internal refugees displaced by the war in Ukraine,” she added.
While Janowicz extolled the battalions, an on-screen graphic displayed patches of four paramilitaries: Aidar, Dnipro-1, Donbas, and Azov. All four have a documented record of war crimes, while Azov is an outright neo-Nazi group.
On September 10, 2014, three years before Jankowicz’s warm portrayal of volunteer battalions, Newsweek ran an article titled “Ukrainian Nationalist Volunteers Committing ‘ISIS-style’ War Crimes.” The story, which covered a report by Amnesty International, featured Aidar, one of the battalions lauded in Jankowicz’s segment. According to Amnesty, Aidar fighters amassed a record of “widespread abuses,” ranging from kidnapping and torture to “possible executions.”
Three months later, Amnesty issued an urgent report about Aidar and Dnipro-1—another paramilitary featured in Jankowicz’s segment—blocking food from eastern Ukrainian towns and villages. “Using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a war crime,” Amnesty stated.
(Of course, almost every war crime charged against one side in this conflict has also been charged against the other; Russia has reportedly recently been blocking food in its siege of Mariupol.)
The Donbas Battalion—the third paramilitary in Jankowicz’s segment—is another unit notorious for torture, as documented by the UN, among others. The fourth group, Azov, not only has its own history of war crimes, but is avowedly neo-Nazi; indeed, the Azov patch shown in Jankowicz’s video has a stylized Wolfsangel (the “N” with the sword)—a popular white supremacist rune used by groups like Aryan Nations.
Azov—which is now a premier hub of transnational white supremacy—has been extensively covered by Western media outlets, including by me in The Nation. Its nature was well known by the time of Jankowicz’s 2017 StopFake video. (In a 2020 book, Jankowicz briefly acknowledged Azov is a “far-right group,” but immediately pivoted to portraying them as victims of a Russian hoax.)
During Jankowicz’s tenure with StopFake (her last known episode aired May 21, 2017), the disinformation site continued being touted as a pioneer in combating Russian propaganda. In March 2017, a fawning Politico story heralded StopFake as the “grand wizards” of the anti-fake news ecosystem. It was an ironically prophetic description, given that Jankowicz’s misleading “nothing to see here” report about the battalions turned out to be a mere fraction of what StopFake has done for Ukraine’s far right.
By 2018, StopFake started defending C14, a neo-Nazi gang that conducted horrific pogroms of Ukraine’s Roma. After media outlet Hromadske described C14 as neo-Nazi, one of StopFake’s founders tweeted “for Hromadske, C14 is ‘neo-Nazi,’ in reality one of them—Oleksandr Voitko—is a war veteran and before going to the war—alum and faculty at @MohylaJSchool, journalist at Foreign news desk at Channel 5. Now also active participant of war veterans grass-root organization,” as if the fact that the gang has a veteran somehow precludes it from being neo-Nazi.
In 2020, StopFake defended C14 in a press release. The same year, news broke that C14 was aiding Kyiv police in enforcing Covid quarantine measures; StopFake labeled this fake news, denying C14 is far-right, describing it as a “community organization” instead, and citing C14’s own denial of carrying out anti-Roma pogroms as “evidence” of its innocence.
In reality, C14’s ties to Ukrainian authorities have been verified by Radio Free Europe (US government–run media), among others. By now, even the US State Department classifies C14 as a “nationalist hate group.”
StopFake has also continued defending the Azov Battalion. Last month, StopFake tweeted that the unit—which was formed out of a neo-Nazi gang, uses two neo-Nazi symbols on its insignia, and has been documented as neo-Nazi by numerous Western outlets—“doesn’t profess #Nazi views as official ideology,” labeling stories about Azov and neo-Nazism as fake news.
This is particularly disturbing because in February, Facebook reversed its ban on praising Azov. Facebook had previously banned the Azov battalion’s account as well as posts celebrating the neo-Nazi organization. The reversal is stunning, given the platform’s professed commitment to combating far-right extremism.
It’s unclear whether StopFake played a role in Facebook’s decision to lift its Azov ban, but considering StopFake is Facebook’s official fact-checking partner, it’s hard to believe the group’s track record of whitewashing Azov wasn’t a factor.
The “grand wizards” of battling fake news have even dabbled with Holocaust distortion, downplaying WWII-era paramilitaries who slaughtered Jews as mere “historic figures” and Ukrainian nationalist leaders, while attacking members of the US Congress who had denounced Ukraine’s glorification of Nazi collaborators.
Astonishingly, when Jankowicz herself was quoted in a July 2020 New York Times story about StopFake’s going off the rails, the article failed to disclose the fact that the disinformation expert being quoted used to work with the group.
Painting neo-Nazi paramilitaries with an extensive record of war crimes as patriots helping refugees, all while working with a “disinformation” group that turned out to run interference for violent neo-Nazi formations—that’s the experience Biden’s new disinformation czar brings to the table.
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California, www.cetisresearch.org; an expert analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com; and an analyst at Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation (Chicago), www.geostrategicforecasting.com. He is the author of the forthcoming book from McFarland Publishers Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the Making of the Ukrainian Crisis and ‘New Cold War.
On 16 March 1968, U.S. Army soldiers massacred between 347 to 504 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in Sơn Tịnh District, South Vietnam, on 16 March 1968 during the Vietnam War. There were other ‘lesser’ massacres in Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese also committed atrocities both during and certainly after the war. But this article is about the U.S. war in Vietnam, but about a massacre of supposedly an approximately equal number of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha, Ukraine by Russian soldiers in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
The Western-Ukrainian narrative is that Russians slaughtered hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha, the bodies found on the streets, in basements, and in mass graves once Ukrainian forces pushed the Russians out of Bucha. Within hours of Ukrainian officials claims of a major massacre, US officials were calling for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be brought up on war crimes charges. No investigation, no facts had yet been presented. The reality is beginning to appear starkly different the Ukrainian and Western claims, though it certainly does not whitewash all the Russian troops who were in Bucha. We still do not know the entire when, where, who and how of all the killings in Bucha, but it appears that a strong majority of some 400 dead were the usual, tragic casualties of war. I present some tentative conclusions from my reading of Western, Ukrainian, Russian and UN sources.
The Western/Kiev narrative begins to fall apart from the start. First, the Russians were not simply forced out of Bucha; part of the departure was an organized pre-planned withdrawal. Russian forces withdrew voluntarily after the Russian delegation to peace talks in Istanbul announced on March 29th that Russian troops would withdraw from the area around Kiev as a way of facilitating a better negotiating atmosphere (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pentagon-dubious-russian-withdrawal-north-kyiv-expects-troops/story?id=83740519). Although this may have been more a case of withdrawing as part of a redeployment to the south as part of the second phase of the war focused on expelling all Ukrainian forces out of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts (and perhaps all of ‘Novorossiya’ and the Azov and Black Sea coasts from Donbass to Odessa), there is no evidence the Russians were forced out of Bucha. However, significant losses drove some to take out their anger on civilians in Bucha much as occurred in My Lai over half a century ago.
RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN TROOPS IN BUCHA IN MARCH 2022
Such basic information as which forces controlled which parts of Bucha on which dates is unavailable, except for the few days before and after the 30-31 March Russian withdrawal, after which Ukrainian forces took over the city entirely. I have tried to reconstruct the shifting presence of Russian and Ukrainian troops in Bucha from early March to early April (see Appendix).
Russians first held parts of Bucha on March 8th. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted no major attacks on northwestern Kyiv in March 9-14 (www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-14). On March 10th Russian forces only controlled part of Bucha, meaning Ukrainian forces held the other areas of Bucha: Russian forces occupy a ring of positions north and west of Kyiv running through Poliske, Kukhari, Borodyanka, Andriyivka, Motyzhyn, Horenychi, Bucha” and “made slight advances” in Bucha on theat day (www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-10). On March 11th Ukraine’s Defense Ministry reported that Russian forces “attempted to break through Ukrainian defenses in Andriivka, Zhovtneve, Kopyliv, Motyzhyn, Buzova, Horenychi, and Bucha” (the ring of suburbs north and northwest on Kyiv) and later stated “at 6:00 am local time on March 11 that Russian forces failed to secure any territory” (www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-11). For the next few days Russian forces made little to no gains. Thus, Russian forces control if not presence in terms of territorial expanse in Bucha before March 12th. Recall that the New York Times reporting on the Bucha massacre claims the dead on Yablonskaya Street and perhaps elsewhere had been lying there since March 9-11. There is no report that Russian forces held that part of Bucha specifically until the appearance of the massacre claims. Thus, Russian forces did not control all of Bucha on the key dates of March 9-11, when the New York Times claims that the eight bodies in the infamous satellite photo it published were first photographed lying on the streets. More curiously, after supposedly three weeks lying in the outdoors with above freezing temperatures, these bodies in the NYT satellite photographs rather than being bloated and putrid, appeared as only recently killed, with no bloating or significant decay.
The Ukrainian General Staff reported that on March 13th-14th Russian forces launched several unsuccessful assaults and “limited attacks” against Irpin and Bucha (www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-14). There still had been no reports in this period that civilians were being shot by Russian troops or that corpses littered Yablonskaya Street. In other words, the corpses were not lying on Yablonskaya in this period, or they were corpses of people killed by shelling or by Ukrainian forces and/or Ukrainian territorial defense groups in the city during March or after having entered it on March 31-April 1. Perhaps some were even killed by regular criminals.
On March 27th Russian forces were shelling Bucha, meaning Ukrainian forces must have been inside the city’s boundaries somewhere. Kyiv Oblast civil authorities and the Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian shelling focused on Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, Borodyanka, and Makariv, but Russian forces did not apparently conduct ground operations for the last 24 hours (www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-27). On March 28th Ukrainian forces began counterattacks in the Irpin area as a staging ground for counterattacks on Bucha and other towns. Kyiv Obalst military authorities confirmed the recapture of Irpin, which was removed from their list of Russian-occupied Kiev suburbs. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Ukrainian counterattacks were intended to deter Russian offensive action (https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-28). According to Ukrainian sources, Russian forces remained dug in the Bucha and Nemishyev areas as of March 29th (www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-29).
On March 30-31 Ukrainian sources reported that fighting continued throughout Bucha, Makariv, and Hostomel (www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-31). Then the Russian forces withdrew from Bucha on March 31-April 1, and Ukrainian forces control Bucha by April 1st. The world did not hear a word about Russian atrocities and corpses lying on Bucha’s streets until after Ukrainian ‘clean up’ squads enter the city to clean out traitors and quislings on April 2nd. It was reported on 2 April 2022 that Ukrainian police had entered Bucha to flush out possible “saboteurs or accomplices” of the Russian troops (https://vesti.ua/kiev/politsejskij-spetsnaz-nachal-zachistku-goroda-bucha). To reiterate, Russian forces had full or nearly full control of Bucha for 9-10 days, from March 22nd to April 1st.
Thus, Ukrainian forces were still in Bucha in some strength throughout mid-March and only episodically or in small teams thereafter, until the March 31 Russian withdrawal. During the periods 21-22, 25-26, 28-29, the Ukrainian military presence was very limited if existent at all inside the city, but the dead on Yablonskaya were reported to have been there since 9-11 March and the mass grave was dug on March 10th (see below). But information on precisely where in Bucha various Russian and Ukrainian forces were present and active was limited until Ukrainian forces entered the city on April 1st and remains incomplete today.
Bodies in the Streets
The New York Times published satellite surveillance firm Maxar photographs purporting to show that some 8-20 bodies of Ukrainian civilians shot by Russian troops were lying on Bucha’s Yablonskaya Street from March 9-11 to the March 30th completion of the Russian withdrawal. Somehow, not one resident of Bucha reported to any authority that Russians had killed civilians or photographed the bodies and sent them to an authority through the entire period from 9-11 March to the 30 March completion of the Russian withdrawal during which supposedly some 20 bodies were said by the New York Times and Maxar to have been lying on the street. On 31 March 2022, Bucha’s mayor made a video to celebrate the liberation of the city. He called it a “happy day” and made no mention of civilians having been massacred by Russian troops or bodies lying in the streets (https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1510789934827053056.html and https://web.archive.org/web/20220404062459im_/https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1510789777888804865/pu/vid/640×362/GuxBWwP7U-5tDrfa.mp4?tag=12). At the same time, a member of the Bucha city council, Katerina Ukraintseva, ignored the bodies on the streets in her first comments immediately after the Russian withdrawal but three days suddenly mentioned them in accordance with the new pro-NATO narrative. On April 3rd she asserted they had been lying on Yablonskaya since the “beginning of March” (https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/1337 ). Had she suddenly got the memo or did she just forget about the rotting corpses of some 20 fellow Buchanians shot by the hated Russian forces for three weeks? In an interview given to the media outlet Meduza (classified as a foreign agent in Russia) at the same time, a female resident of Bucha and member of its territorial defense unit (hastily formed volunteer units formed on the war’s eve and responsible for vigilante justice and human rights violations since the war began**), said that “the people lying on Yablonskaya died because of chaotic shooting.” Curiously, she did not report that Russian soldiers shot civilians during their occupation of the city (www.donbass-insider.com/2022/04/04/ukraine-the-massacre-of-bucha-a-ukrainian-timisoara/). The corpses not being the bodies of victims of a criminal Russian massacre might explain why city officials originally at least did not draw attention to any corpses on their city streets, if we assume they did lie there for three weeks. Interestingly enough, post-battle videos of Mariupol show a similar pattern of corpses strewn along the streets intermittently. This is a pattern of war.
On 2 April 2022, the bodies on Yablonskaya Street were filmed from an unidentified car, and the video is published late at night on Twitter and replayed around the world as a ‘Russian war crime’. This suggests – putting aside the NYT/Maxar satellite photos – that these people died (or their bodies were placed) on the streets after the posting of the mayor’s video and before the time of the video showing the bodies on Yablonskaya Street on . But the same day it was reported that Ukrainian police had entered Bucha to flush out possible “saboteurs or accomplices” of the Russian troops (https://vesti.ua/kiev/politsejskij-spetsnaz-nachal-zachistku-goroda-bucha). They were accompanied by fighters under the command of Azov neo-fascist ‘Botsman Korotkikh. A Ukrainian police video of the bodies on Yablonskaya Street released on April 2nd (when it was made is unknown) shows thin corpses with fresh, clean clothing not bloated with filthy clothing that would be the case for corpses on the streets for three weeks (https://archive.ph/HRtqx; www.sott.net/image/s32/642783/full/Bucha_man.jpg; and https://web.archive.org/web/20220404073351/https:/threadreaderapp.com/thread/1510590248140800003.html). This indicates that if these are wounded and that they were shot very recently, not two days prior when Russian troops were in town. The video is taken from a military vehicle in the column, not the first vehicle in the column. An alternative but unlikely correct hypothesis is that the bodies were placed on the streets by Ukrainian operatives, photographed by satellites (Maxar has ties to US intelligence), and then removed. When Korotkikh and his fighters videoed their entry into Bucha and drive down Yablonskaya Street, there were no corpses. Korotkikh’s fighters seemed to receive permission to shoot at males not wearing the Ukrainian forces’ light blue armband in another video, when they were moving on foot. Russian and its allied breakaway republics DNR and LNR wear white armbands. Korotkikh posted a video titled “The Boatsman’s Boys in Bucha”, which at the 6 second mark has the following dialogue: “There are guys without blue armbands, can I shoot them?” “Fuck yeah” (https://twitter.com/RWApodcast/status/1510712264726396944). This would explain the white armbands on some 4-5 of the corpses shown in the above-mentioned videos, which are nevertheless being attributed in the West and Ukraine to a ‘Russian massacre’. Moreover, more of the corpses may be wearing the white bands than is obvious from the photos; the bands are not visible in the photographs because the corpses are lined up closely together and photographed from the side. The Ukrainian troops and militants, therefore, might have captured and killed white-armbanded civilians, regarding them to be collaborators of the Russians.
On the other hand, some Bucha residents have described Russians shooting Bucha residents. This, for me, is solid evidence that the Russian and/or pro-Russian (Chechen, DNR/LNR) forces likely also committed some illegal shootings — war crimes — in Bucha (www.facebook.com/watch/?v=276797881324318). There is also the satellite video of Russian forces killing a bicyclist. But there is still no evidence of killing on a mass scale during their month-long presence in Bucha. As we shall see, the confirmed numbers to date amount to approximately one killing per day and no systematic policy that one would need to establish ‘genocide.’ The Ukrainians then added to the above-mentioned far less weighty evidence of a mass war massacre their false claims about hundreds of shootings and their victims’ mass graves. This is the first way in which characterization of the Bucha street dead as a large ‘Russian massacre’ is a ‘fake’, exaggeration, misinterpretation, or Ukrainian strategic communicators’ bizarre wishful thinking.
Mass Graves
There is a second sense in which the Western narrative appears to be fake or at least wrong. We have the Bucha ‘civilians’ (already declared so, despite the presence of non-uniformed Ukrainian defense formations everywhere in UKraine) buried in the mass grave near the church. However, their burial occurred in mid-March and bespeaks of something else than a massacre. It was ordered by the city morgue, overseen by a leading doctor from the local medical center, and videotaped. Those involved in the burial categorized them as civilians killed in bombings. Keep in mind that both Russians and Ukrainians were bombing each other, and the Ukrainian forces have been routinely placing air defense, artillery and other attack equipment near homes even though they died during the bombing and were not executed by Russian soldiers at all.
Western and Kievan media have ignored the date and videotaping of the 10 March mass burial of 67 bombing victims in order to write it off as the result of a Russian ‘massacre’. The first mass grave in Bucha, according to Maxar Technologies, was dug on March 10th after heavy fighting as Russian forces attempted to enter the town (https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-04-03/satellite-images-show-45-foot-long-trench-at-grave-site-in-bucha-maxar). A local doctor calmly organized the sealing of the individual dead in body bags and their burial in a mass grave, which was videoed and placed on YouTube on the same day, 12 March. The doctor, Aleksandr Levkivskiy, is seen in the video speaking calmly and moving bagged bodies from a flat truck to the mass grave [See “«Братская могила на территории церкви»: в Буче похоронили 67 мирных граждан, погибших от обстрелов” (‘Common Grave on the territory of a church’: 67 civilians killed in shelling were buried in Bucha), YouTube.com, 12 March 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN7vYAU-2Vc and https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/1214]. This doctor also posted about his activities to evacuate the local population from March 8th to March 22nd, without any mention of Russian atrocities but mentioning bombing (www.donbass-insider.com/2022/04/06/bucha-massacre-when-satellite-images-and-videos-are-manipulated-to-tell-a-false-story/ and https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/1286). Some of the links just cited were once on Twitter and Facebook but have since been dutifully removed (removed Twitter posts regarding Bucha include https://mobile.twitter.com/gbazov/status/1511727185257762821; Facebook deletes include facebook.com/Andrii.Levkivs… then reposted here: ms-my.facebook.com/4kmps/videos/%…). So instead of being treated as a burial site of the typical victims of war or an event needing impartial investigation, the Bucha mass grave is being characterized by Western (first of all Ukrainian) governments and media as a grave of civilian victims shot by Russian soldiers as an act of revenge of a defeated army on the basis of pre-packaged interpretations and the complete absence of any evidence of an intentional ‘Russian massacre.’ This is all the more odd, since, as I have shown, Bucha was not under control of Russian forces throughout the entire period from March 9th to their March 30-31 withdrawal. We do not know precisely yet when and what parts of Bucha Russian and Ukrainian forces controlled in this period. We do know that Ukrainian forces had full control by morning, April 1st, just before the claims of atrocities emerged as police and neofascist forces hunted down colluders.
Even if one were to categorize all the dead — the 67 dead in the mass grave, the 20 on Yablonskaya Street, the 9 near and in the building where the Russian soldiers allegedly were stationed, and tens of others about the city — the number of dead killed by war crimes does not approach 100. The Ukrainian and Western governments claiming a Russian atrocity that killed 410 civilians. It remains unclear whether all 130 corpses are those of civilians, whether more than 20 were killed intentionally, not to mention whether Russian/DNR-LNR forces or Ukrainian forces did the killing. The 5 or so executed or shot wearing white armbands (several on Yablonskaya, at least one in a basement) were more likely executed by Ukrainian troops for collaborating with Russian troops. For a month Bucha was under shelling by Russian and Ukrainian forces. In such conditions one regretfully should expect tens, even hundreds of dead civilians.
So the NYT has uncovered some corroboration for 12 Russian war crimes and possibly another 20.
In the article, the NYT with help from the local Ukrainian prosecutor mixed apples and oranges in an apparent attempt to pad the gravity of the atrocity: “Of the 360 bodies found through this weekend in Bucha and its immediate surroundings, more than 250 were killed by bullets or shrapnel and were being included in an investigation of war crimes, Ruslan Kravchenko, chief regional prosecutor in Bucha, said in an interview.” The figure of 360 falls short of the 410 shot by Russians according to Zelenskiy. More importantly, the figure of 250 falls even shorter and to be reached the alleged number of those killed by shrapnel was mixed in with those shot. How many of the supposedly 250 were shot? How many of them were killed by shrapnel (Russian or Ukrainian)? No clarity. Also, the NYT quotes local officials’ distortion of figures mirroring the ratios offered by the federal authorities, by claiming: “Overall, in the broader Bucha region, there were at least 1,000 deaths in the war, he said. The dead are overwhelmingly civilians. Only two members of the Ukrainian military were among those killed in Bucha city, according to Serhiy Kaplychny, an official at the city cemetery.” In this way, they attempt stealthily to attribute all the deaths to Russian bullets and shrapnel, and they repeat the underreporting of Ukrainian military casualties and exaggeration of civilian casualties. Anyone vaguely familiar with war casualties can tell you that civilian and military casualties are usually relatively comparable; a 1,000-2 ratio is impossible.
International Organizations: Better Work Finding Dozens, Not Hundreds Killed
As of April 10th, Human Rights Watch was able to document only 9 intentional war crimes (“killings of civilians”) and 7 accidental such killings. Not the hundreds declared by the West and Kiev, not even tens. Moreover, no evidence has been presented by HRW that Russians committed the intentional or accidental killings (https://strana.news/news/387546-human-rights-watch-zafiksirovala-mnozhestvo-dokazatelstv-voennykh-prestuplenij-v-buche.html). To be sure, Russian forces have committed war crimes. There are credible reports of three such crimes, including the killing of the bicyclist for which there is a video (www.reuters.com/world/europe/death-defiance-bucha-neighbourhood-that-was-held-by-russian-troops-2022-04-07/ and www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/world/europe/bucha-shooting-video.html). Hardly My Lai 2.0, when indeed 400 civilians were slaughtered in cold blood in Vietnam by American troops. There is no evidence to suggest yet that they are on the scale of hundreds being claimed by Ukrainian authorities. The scale is reminiscent of what we call ‘war.’ Some soldiers are brutes, some are pushed to brutality by fear or anger; recall Mi Lai in Vietnam and numerous other war atrocities across history. But there is no evidence that these Russian atrocities are a part of Russian military policy.
The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) also has concluded that there was far less Russian criminal violence in Bucha than the Zelenskiy regime and Western governments and media claim. During an April 9th mission to Bucha, UN human rights officers “documented the unlawful killing, including by summary execution, of some 50 civilians.” But there is no indication of which side committed the executions. Again, recall the National Police and punitive battalions seeking out colluders in Bucha from April 1st. In addition, “HRMMU has received more than 300 allegations of killings of civilians in towns in the regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy, all under the control of Russian armed forces in late February and early March.” In addition to “allegations” of Russian killing, the HRMMU has “also received information about alleged arbitrary and incommunicado detentions by Ukrainian forces or people aligned with them. In some cases, relatives do not have information about where their loved ones are, raising serious concerns regarding enforced disappearance, compliance with due process and the risk of torture and ill-treatment” (https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/04/bachelet-urges-respect-international-humanitarian-law-amid-growing-evidence?fbclid=IwAR2IYnFKNe3ibtN-vuv6oHX6BMcF0uNRuC1Eg0RJbJb3EVivRfiMcO6K9-k). This suggests that some of the dead may be the victims of Ukrainian forces.
CONCLUSION
So it appears, the Maidan regime, with help from Western governments and media, are attempting to parlay the overall humanitarian and military tragedy in and around Kiev into a provocative fake, which grossly exaggerates any Russian atrocities and covers up any and all Ukrainian atrocities that also might have occurred. Using the usual casualties of war as a foundation, they have padded exponentially the number of civilians deliberately killed by Russian forces in Bucha, which could a little more or less than a dozen and may not outnumber Ukrainian reprisals against those locals who may have colluded or even fraternized with the invading force, for example by simply accepting or trading for food or by somehow assisting the Russian forces by providing information. They raised the number of victims of repressions from somewhere perhaps in the teens, twenties or several tens to hundreds of murders–again perhaps in order to cover up equivalent war crimes committed by Ukrainians. It is suggestive that Ukraine and, in the UN, the United Kingdom blocked a proposal by Russia to discuss setting up an independent investigation of the events in Bucha.
Of course, perhaps all the caveats I have presented above will be explained by further investigation. But is not that the real point? Should not arrest, trial, and punishment come after the evidence of an actual crime having been committed is gathered, analyzed, and summarized to demonstrate commission of a crime and by whom said crime was committed? We had a hint of the Western attempt (and there will be Russian ones as well) to turn any tragedy in this war into a Russian war crime. Recall Senator Marco Rubio’s set up question to Victoria Nuland at recent hearings. He asked her about whether a chemical attack, should one occur in Ukraine, could be attributed to anyone but the Russians, and of course she said no. Remember this is in a country where those now in power arrived there blood soaked on the basis of a false flag terrorist snipers’ massacre committed by the neofascist wing of the Maidan protests and not by order of soon to be overthrown Yanukovych. This is in regards to a country embattled in war and seething with neofascist-led military and para-military units with ties to the same massacre of their own people and fellow Maidan demonstrators. Moreover, the founding experience of the Maidan regime – the spilling of blood of its own citizens and seeming political allies – shows just how impossible it is in this country (as in Russia often) to make determinations about whom has committed one or another crime. What appears to have happened is that some Russian forces reacted to their own losses and lashed out on the My Lai model.
It must be said that both sides are committing war crimes in this war, and most likely few if any will be punished. It is beyond ironic – indeed condemnatory of the human condition — to see Western, Ukrainian, and Russian sources expressing outrage at the atrocities committed by the other side, while hailing those committed by their own. With no one reporting in a balanced fashion, the sides grow intensively more antagonistic, assuring there will be massacres, extrajudicial executions, tortuous deaths, and the Ukrainians and Russians will have an equal hand in them proportional to their capacity. In the Russo-Ukrainian war, history is likely to record that there indeed was a moral equivalency. Proposed by NATO expansion to Ukraine and accepted by Putin, the decision to start this new war made all this inevitable.
Finally, it is disturbing is the massive attention, resources, and journalistic energy the West devoted immediately to frame the crimes as violence on an unprecedented scale and, in the view of the President of the United States, a genocide. This absurdity sits uncomfortably aside the blanket Western indifference to the systematic — not just spur of the moment — violence destroying and harming mostly ethnic Russian civilians committed by the neofascist-controlled Azov Battalion in Mariupol (and elsewhere) for weeks now. For those interested in the other side of the story — Ukraine’s war crimes and atrocities — approximately one hundred videos showing Ukrainian war crimes or eyewitness testimonies of Ukrainian war crimes can be found on my Facebook page. These cover only a three-week period of the war and do not amount to a definitive list. The videos testify to hundreds of mostly Donbass Russian-Ukrainians killed wantonly by Ukrainian forces. The mass violence first initiated in Ukraine on 20 February 2014 on the Maidan by the latter’s neofascist elements, killing approximately one hundred and wounding more, seems destined to metastasize further.
From 4 a.m. on 24 February 2022, when the Russian Federation’s armed attack against Ukraine started, to 24:00 midnight on 8 May 2022 (local time), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded 7,061 civilian casualties in the country: 3,381 killed and 3,680 injured. This included:
-a total of 3,381 killed (1,227 men, 787 women, 75 girls, and 91 boys, as well as 69 children and 1,132 adults whose sex is yet unknown)
-a total of 3,680 injured (521 men, 396 women, 83 girls, and 93 boys, as well as 170 children and 2,417 adults whose sex is yet unknown)
In Donetsk and Luhansk regions: 3,694 casualties (1,810 killed and 1,884 injured)
On Government-controlled territory: 3,140 casualties (1,699 killed and 1,441 injured)
On territory controlled by Russian affiliated armed groups: 554 casualties (111 killed and 443 injured)
In other regions of Ukraine (the city of Kyiv, and Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Rivne, Vinnytsia and Zhytomyr regions), which were under Government control when casualties occurred: 3,367 casualties (1,571 killed and 1,796 injured)
Most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple launch rocket systems, and missile and air strikes.
OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration. This concerns, for example, Mariupol (Donetsk region), Izium (Kharkiv region), and Popasna (Luhansk region), where there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties.
An increase in figures in this update compared with the previous update (as of 24:00 midnight on 5 May 2022 (local time) should not be attributed to civilian casualties that occurred from 6 to 8 May only, as during these days OHCHR also corroborated casualties that occurred on previous days. Similarly, not all civilian casualties that were reported from 6 to 8 May have been included into the above figures. Some of them are still pending corroboration and if confirmed, will be reported on in future updates.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine
Since 2014, OHCHR has been documenting civilian casualties in Ukraine. Reports are based on information that the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) collected through interviews with victims and their relatives; witnesses; analysis of corroborating material confidentially shared with HRMMU; official records; open-source documents, photo and video materials; forensic records and reports; criminal investigation materials; court documents; reports by international and national non-governmental organisations; public reports by law enforcement and military actors; data from medical facilities and local authorities. All sources and information are assessed for their relevance and credibility and cross-checked against other information. In some instances, corroboration may take time. This may mean that conclusions on civilian casualties may be revised as more information becomes available and numbers may change as new information emerges over time .
Since 24 February 2022, in the context of the Russian Federation’s military action in Ukraine, HRMMU has been unable to visit places of incidents and interview victims and witnesses there. All other sources of information have been extensively used, including HRMMU contact persons and partners in places where civilian casualties occurred. Statistics presented in the current update are based on individual civilian casualty records where the “reasonable grounds to believe” standard of proof was met, namely where, based on a body of verified information, an ordinarily prudent observer would have reasonable grounds to believe that the casualty took place as described.
