It's almost too terrible to write about

Bucha, Ukraine after Russian retreat

I’ve been covering the war in Ukraine for almost six weeks, and I thought I had seen it all:  blown up tanks by the roadsides, Russian soldiers’ personal effects scattered around the wreckage; the hollow shells of buildings in city after city, interiors so blown out you can see straight through them; the body of a Russian tanker lying in the snow beside his destroyed tank; the frantic faces of the dispossessed waiting in line to flee across the border into Poland or Hungary; a stray German Shepherd rooting around the ruins for scraps, left behind by a family that either fled or was killed.

But the images out of the Kyiv suburb of Bucha bring up memories of books on the Holocaust I read as a boy – bodies lying in a mass grave, hands tied behind them, shot in the head, partially covered with soil at the bottom of a ditch serving as a mass grave; bodies of women lying in the street where they fell, randomly shot by retreating Russian soldiers; an old man making his way slowly down a street littered with the shells of destroyed Russian tanks and APCs, his face a blasted mask of horror and fear.

The word tragic doesn’t do the images justice; nor does calling it a war crime, although clearly that is what is depicted.  It’s worse than that, because what happened in Bucha and other Kyiv suburbs has been defiled by denial from the very top of Kremlin leadership.  But not just any denial:  Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov today took a page out of the American right-wing conspiracy playbook that has for years alleged the Sandy Hook and Parkland school massacres were staged by crisis actors. 

"The other day another fake attack was carried out in the city of Bucha in the Kiev region after the Russian servicemen left the area in accordance with the plans and agreements reached," Lavrov said, according to TASS, the Russian state news agency. "A fake attack was staged there a few days later, and it's being fomented on all channels and social media by Ukrainian representatives and their Western patrons."  Russian media accounts claimed “actors” playing dead bodies had been staged for the “benefit of Western journalists.”  

"Soon they'll be accusing us of genocide.  Bucha was never under full control, and [as our troops left] a neonazi brigade entered and shot up the civilians," one Russian television host claimed.  Russia’s defense ministry asserted that “not a single civilian” had endured any violent military action by Russian forces.

Reporters from the Associated Press saw four bodies at the bottom of a pit in the woods outside the town of Motyzhyn, about 30 miles west of Kyiv.  One was the town’s mayor.  She was blindfolded with her hands tied behind her back.  The other bodies were those of her husband and two young sons.  The pit was dug behind a house where Russian soldiers had stayed during the period they occupied Motyzhyn, before they pulled out over the weekend and made for the Belarus border.

“Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk confirmed that the mayor was killed while being held by Russian forces,” the AP reported earlier today.

Ukrainian sources told the AP that at least 410 bodies of civilians had been recovered from towns outside of Kyiv that Russian forces occupied over the last several weeks.  One citizen of Bucha told the AP that Russian soldiers had gone house to house rounding up people from their homes where they had been hiding in their basements.  He said the Russian soldiers checked their cellphones for evidence of “anti-Russian activities” before taking them into the street and shooting them.  AP journalists reported seeing “at least 21 people with bound hands, close-range gunshot wounds and signs of torture in various spots around Bucha,” a town northwest of Kyiv that was occupied by Russian forces until April 1st.  Russian troops had used the town as a base from which to shell Kyiv for at least four weeks.

You know the Russians are desperate when they crib from the likes of Alex Jones, the host of the Infowars website who has made a career out of claiming that massacres in Las Vegas, Orlando, Aurora, San Bernadino, Parkland, and Newtown were faked by “crisis actors.” Marjorie Taylor Greene has also called recent school massacres “staged” events for the media and claimed Nancy Pelosi has used “fake” events to justify gun control laws.

Now the American right-wing’s fellow traveler Vladimir Putin has jumped on their rhetorical bandwagon, claiming Ukraine has faked the deaths of its own citizens.  The only thing missing from this phantasmagoria of sick horror is blaming the whole thing on Joe Biden, but just you wait.