STRATEGY TWO: How Russia Comments on Its War Crimes
By Oleh Melnychenko
Strategy 2. Debunking
When the photo and video proof of the war crimes of the Russian army somehow slips into the Russian media sphere, pro-Kremlin fact-checkers come into action. They try to “debunk” the terrible scenes allegedly staged by Ukrainians for compromising Russia or to move the Western audience to pity.
The attempts to clear Russia this way began in the first weeks of the war, after the Russian army bombed Mariupol maternity hospital. Then Russian media claimed that 1) there were no civilians in the hospital at the moment of shelings, since the Ukrainian army expelled them and turned the hospital into a firing point (refutation) and 2) all the wounded women are mere grimed actresses (refutation).
At times, Russia staged the staging itself: thus, the Russian audience was offered to laugh upon the handless Western propagandists who were filming the report about the killed Ukrainian civilians while the “corpse” in the background continued to move. As it soon appeared, the original footage was taken in Vienna, during the demonstration against climate policy (and was already misinterpreted by anti-vaxxers to prove that the news about the death from Covid-19 was fake).
In general, Russian propaganda holds its audience in a conspiracy atmosphere, always alert to the danger of foreign stagings and slander. When the squad of the French detachment of technical and scientific gendarmes arrived at Lviv to identify the victims of Russian aggression and to investigate the circumstances of their death, the Russian deputy revealed their “real” mission: to help the Ukrainian army with clearing the evidence of its crimes.
“In general, Russian propaganda holds its audience in a conspiracy atmosphere, always alert to the danger of foreign stagings and slander”
Three aforementioned examples may create an impression that the informational war with Russian fact-checkers consists of rather funny examples, as usual discussions with the downwitted conspirologists are, but in fact most of the time one deals with the shocking cynicism. The massacre that took place in the capital suburb Bucha became one of the most terrible episodes of the war. For many foreign observers, it became the decisive proof that the Russian-Ukrainian war is not a domestic feud in which only minor political details are at stake, but a war for the physical survival of Ukrainians. Quite naturally, Russian media initiated a campaign against the defamation of the Russian army. The fact-checkers from Detector Media selected 18 general Russian narratives about Bucha. Most of them can be summarized as “all the murders are either faked or committed by Ukrainian army after it regained the town”. Here are some of them:
Isn’t it suspicious that the photos of the bodies in Bucha appeared only on the fourth day after the Russian army left the town?
True, the photos spread widely only after President Zelenskyi visited the place of the tragedy in the 4th of April. But the analytics from The New York Times, based on the satellite images, proved that the first corps appeared in the streets of Bucha already in between 9th and 11th of March, three weeks before Russians’ withdrawal. The Russian media Meduza also published the drone footage, testifying that those numerous dead bodies which appeared in Bucha in the end of March (while the town was under Russian control) correspond to those discovered in April.Some corps move their hand or even sit when the cameramen passes through them.
Such claims appeared already on April 3 and became widely shared in the pro-Kremlin accounts on social media. Later, numerous fact-checkers proved that the “waving” of the hand is but a defect on a windshield through which the footage was taken, and the figure of the “sitting” man was distorted in the rearview mirror. Eventually, even the Telegram channel that first posted this alleged “debunking” admitted it.There is a video where Ukrainian soldiers pull the dead bodies with wire to arrange the scene of the so-called massacre.
Multiple Russian media broadcasted this footage in order to refute the accusation in one war crime, but in fact it demonstrates the consequences of the other one. In fact, this footage by The Associated Press shows the work of Ukrainian soldiers gathering the bodies of those murdered in Bucha. Since the precedents of mining the corps by Russians were known already in March, the soldiers use the wires and ropes in order to check whether these corps are mined. Given their lack of experience of dealing with such kinds of mines, it is understandable why they chose this method to move the bodies safely.The “dead” girl from Bucha appeared to be alive.
Pro-Kremlin accounts in social media, like this one from the occupied Donetsk, shared the philippic posts about the girl Nastia Savchyshyn who confessed that the photo of her being dead in Bucha was fake. The fact of the matter is that Nastia's explanatory post was about the flashmob intended to draw the world’s attention to the Bucha massacre. Furthermore, the photo of the dead girl used by the Russian propaganda was real and depicted a Ukrainian girl truly killed by the Russian army in Bucha.
Most of the fakes and debunkings mentioned in the article were collected and analyzed by Ukrainian fact-checkers from StopFake and Detector Media (with its two projects #DisinfoChronicle and Russian Fake Go F*** Yourself), to which I am grateful. Both for materials and for their struggle.