Russian disinformation on Bucha: distract, deny, confuse

Eyewitness reports, satellite images and videos prove the atrocities committed in Bucha, which was under Russian occupation. But the Kremlin is trying to cast doubt on the evidence and sow confusion.

After the liberation of the Kiev suburb of Bucha, numerous photos and videos of atrocities have been published. Reporters and journalists from media from different countries were also in Butscha and spoke to people there and took their own pictures. Ukraine, among others, accuses Russia of being responsible for the crimes. Moscow categorically denies this – following a well-known pattern.

Counter-accusations without evidence

Russia rejected all allegations and responded with unsubstantiated allegations and conspiracy legends. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described the scenes outside of Kiev as a “staged anti-Russian provocation”. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, without giving further details, claimed that the images contained “signs of video falsification”.

One of Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin’s closest allies said – also without any evidence whatsoever – that the claim that Russian forces had executed civilians in Bucha was a falsification of Ukrainian and Western propaganda intended to discredit Russia. “These are fakes that have matured in the cynical imagination of Ukrainian propaganda,” said Dmitry Medvedev, who was president from 2008 to 2012 and is now deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council. “They were hatched for huge sums of money,” Medvedev said.

The pro-Russian “Cyberfront Z” distributed instructions via a public Telegram channel to distract from the crimes on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram or Telegram. For example, it is claimed that the massacre was “staged” by Ukrainian actors. A German author for the Russian state broadcaster RT DE linked the atrocities to allegedly staged crimes in Syria.

Russia and pro-Putin activists reacted similarly after the attacks on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, when Moscow claimed the victims of the Russian attack were paid actresses. Among other things, the ZDF proved that this was a lie by Moscow.

Satellite images as further evidence

There is also no evidence to support the assertion that the pictures from Butscha were staged. Numerous eyewitnesses unanimously report crimes committed by the Russian occupiers. Also show according to research by the “New York Times” Satellite images show that mass graves were being dug before Butscha was liberated and that corpses were lying on the streets.

There are also videos on social networks like Twitter that were published in mid-March and show a mass grave in Bucha.

Turn

Russia claimed that the occupying forces had completely left Bucha as early as March 30. A Ukrainian soldier who was in town and with the tagesschau.de was able to speak, however, said that the last Russian troops had only left Bucha on the night of April 1/2. Fighting still took place there on the 1st. He himself came to Bucha in the early morning of April 2nd. “We made progress step by step,” explains the soldier – and emphasizes: “All the pictures and the film material are authentic – all the corpses were lying around – burnt houses and cars everywhere.” Many people would have tried to flee, “there are thousands of cars on side roads in the direction of Kyiv”. Russian troops fired at them, people burned in their cars.

Before they left, Russian troops looted numerous houses. According to him, regular Russian infantrymen of unit number 51460 from the village of Knuaze-Volkonske, Khabarovsk Krai, were in Bucha. The Chechens who had been there in the first few weeks had suffered heavy losses and had therefore left well before April.

Confuse

The Russian claims are often not consistent; after the attack on the clinic in Mariupol, Russia claimed, among other things, that there had been no such attack. Then there was talk that Ukrainian battalions were hiding in the hospital – and finally the Kremlin had paid actresses tell the lie to the United Nations, among others.

These disinformation strategies have been known and documented for years. Russia is trying to confuse and probably provoke the public with openly contradictory claims. The Russian embassies in particular play a central role in this, spreading particularly polarizing and provocative claims via social media.

In Syria, too, Moscow repeatedly spoke of allegedly staged war crimes. The main news program of Russian state television even showed footage of shootings as alleged evidence of the staging of such crimes. In fact, it was footage of the shooting of a feature film – the lines between fiction and reality are deliberately blurred in Russian propaganda.

The Bucha massacre is currently a major target of Kremlin disinformation and war propaganda on major social media platforms. Experts from Disinfo.center observe “both state-backed and seemingly independent users spreading disinformation about the massacre in order to disguise the war crimes role and portray it as a ‘false flag operation’ by the Ukrainian government”.

Organizations like Human Rights Watch have been investigating war crimes for years. The director of HRW in Germany, Wenzel Michalski, said in the ZDF, one cannot believe Russia at all. In the ARD He also stated that there was evidence of Russian war crimes in other regions of Ukraine.

Matilda Bogner from the UN said that too ARD, there is evidence of war crimes from different parts of Ukraine. According to Bogner, the extent of the destruction of civilian objects and the many civilian casualties strongly indicate that there have been violations of international law. “In particular, indiscriminate attacks and violations of international humanitarian law can amount to war crimes in this case.”

So while there are numerous eyewitness reports, photographic documents and videos on Russian war crimes and atrocities, which are checked and evaluated by experts, Putin’s regime is spreading unsubstantiated claims and conspiracy legends – without citing any indications or evidence. Instead, Russia is again resorting to strategies of disinformation: distract, deny and confuse.