Who Really Committed War Crimes in Bucha?
Lurid and false atrocity stories have been used before to encourage Western involvement in unnecessary wars.
By Christopher Roach
April 9, 2022
The reports and photographs showing an apparent massacre in Bucha, Ukraine, are truly terrible. They are reminiscent of the atrocities used to galvanize Western opinion during Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, when the Srebrenica Massacre and the Siege of Sarajevo were seared into Western consciousness.
Of course, pictures do not always tell the whole story. For example, to determine whether a war crime took place we must know who did the killing, why, and how. After all, the United States killed many thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, frequently by accident, in the course of those wars. Few in the United States or Europe would call those actions war crimes. This all became apparent after the United States exonerated itself for the annihilation of an Afghan family via a missile strike during the withdrawal of U.S. forces last summer. Oops.
Like any crime, a war crime must involve intent or at least recklessness. Killing civilians or POWs without trial, or humiliating them as an act of revenge, are each undoubtedly war crimes. The documented abuse of prisoners by Donetsk People’s Republic commander Givi was the basis for a Ukrainian war crimes investigation against him, before he was assassinated in 2017.
If civilians were shot and purposefully killed in Bucha, it undoubtedly would be a war crime and a terrible thing. But there are credible reasons to believe the so-called Bucha Massacre was not the doing of the Russian Forces, but rather of the Ukrainians—either local militia or SBU or some combination of thereof—as part of brutal reprisals against “saboteurs” and “Russian collaborators.”
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https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/09/who-really-committed-war-crimes-in-bucha/
