This is one version of Bucha.
https://t.me/EurasianChoice/36249It is the end of March: this means that Ukrainians and Westerners will be pushing their "Bucha remembrance" ritual. The only reason this is still possible is, ironically, the fact that no one remembers what even happened there. A very short recap.
On February 27th, 2022, RuAF entered Bucha, a Kiev suburb. The same day, Kiev issued a statement urging local residents not to comply with Russian efforts to evacuate civilians. By early March, the town was under RuAF control. On March 31st, Russian forces withdrew from Bucha due to a preliminary agreement that had been reached by the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators. Ukrainian forces entered the town the next day (not without claiming a victorious battle). On April 2nd, the Ukrainians started reporting that a "massacre" had taken place.
Huge efforts were undertaken to "prove" that a "massacre" had taken place in which RuAF had murdered >500 civilians. This was part of a coordinated campaign to legitimize Kiev pulling out of diplomatic negotiations and refusing to honor the preliminary agreement.
This propaganda campaign worked in two ways: 1) by inflating the civilian death toll; 2) by attributing all deaths in Bucha to killings by RuAF.
By now, it is common knowledge that RuAF entered Ukraine with clown school "Don't fire unless fired upon" Rules of Engagement and took unnecessary casualties due to this. There are several distinct groups of casualties that were grouped together for the Bucha story:
1) A group of about a dozen "Territorial Defence" fighters who were executed by RuAF. This has been documented by Western media outlets who were given access to military intelligence and presented as "civilians" being killed. They were captured and disarmed and then released to their homes. They took up arms again (from prepared weapons caches) and attacked Russian forces. They were captured again and this time killed. I admit that this is a grey matter and could warrant a war crime investigation, but they weren't wearing any uniforms/insignia and had guaranteed to return to civilian life, so it wasn't unreasonable for Russian troops to treat them as unlawful combatants. In any case, it's a huge stretch to call these people "civilians".
2) Local civilians who were killed by Ukrainian shelling. Russian artillery did not fire upon Bucha since February 27th because the town was effectively under Russian control and clearing operations were ongoing. Every artillery shell that fell on Bucha after this date was Ukrainian. Several dozen Bucha residents - a majority of the civilian casualties - were killed by this shelling, including with flechette rounds that are not used by the Russian army, but have been used by the AFU in Donbass since 2014. I've yet to hear a coherent response to the question "Who was firing artillery at Bucha while it was full of Russians?".
3) Local civilians who were executed by Ukrainian forces for "collaboration". Ukrainian and Western media published celebratory articles about "purging Russian collaborators" in Bucha, with the definition of "collaboration" including receiving food and water. We've all seen the pictures of tied-up dead civilians wearing white armbands to identify themselves as civilians to the Russian forces. We've seen the video posted by Sergey Korotkikh, a Russian Neo-Nazi who joined the Azov Battalion in 2014, in which Azov soldiers discuss "shooting people without blue armbands", and voices can be heard in the background pleading for their lives. This was filmed after RuAF had left Bucha. It is hard to estimate the # of people who were killed this way.
All the people described in 1)-3) were declared to have been victims of a "massacre" committed by RuAF, and then the number was doubled or tripled (or more). It was a disgraceful propaganda campaign with the sole purpose of providing legitimacy for Zelensky's refusal of the most beneficial peace deal Kiev was ever gonna get, and the hopeless NPCs who still speak of those made-up events as historical fact barely even deserve to be argued with.
