• Babs [she/her]
    ·
    2 months ago

    It would sure be cool if we could get an independent investigation at Bucha, if it isn't too late. There have been so many different stories and inconsistencies about what happened there that it becomes very confusing if you don't just take one side completely at face value and ignore any hard questions.

      • Babs [she/her]
        ·
        2 months ago

        If Russia killed a bunch of innocent civilians, I wanna hear about it from someone who isn't at war with Russia.

        • GaveUp [love/loves]
          ·
          2 months ago

          I'm not gonna dig it up but the evidence already showed Azov were the ones that killed the civilians in Bucha. It's a closed case

  • Kieselguhr [none/use name]
    ·
    2 months ago

    What's weird about Bucha that it seems like an isolated atrocity. When the Contras were doing shit like this, it wasn't just one village, but dozens.

    cf.

    The CIA officer in charge of the covert war, Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, admitted to the House Intelligence Committee staff in a secret briefing in 1984 that the Contras were routinely murdering "civilians and Sandinista officials in the provinces, as well as heads of cooperatives, nurses, doctors and judges". But he claimed that this did not violate President Reagan's executive order prohibiting assassinations because the agency defined it as just 'killing'. "After all, this is war—a paramilitary operation", Clarridge said in conclusion.[ Edgar Chamorro explained the rationale behind this to a U.S. reporter. "Sometimes terror is very productive. This is the policy, to keep putting pressure until the people cry 'uncle'". The CIA manual for the Contras, Tayacan, states that the Contras should gather the local population for a public tribunal to "shame, ridicule and humiliate" Sandinista officials to "reduce their influence". It also recommends gathering the local population to witness and take part in public executions. These types of activities continued throughout the war.

    Not that the Russians never commit war crimes, but we have actual fascists like the Contras or the IOF as comparison.

    The other weird thing is, before the SMO, Amnesty said both sides were committing war crimes, but since then it was only Russia? strange

    2014:

    “There is no doubt that summary killings and atrocities are being committed by both pro-Russian separatists and pro-Kyiv forces in Eastern Ukraine, but is difficult to get an accurate sense of the scale of these abuses. It is likely that many have not yet been exposed and that others have been deliberately misrecorded. It is also clear that some of the more shocking cases that have been reported, particularly by Russian media, have been hugely exaggerated,” said John Dalhuisen, Europe and Central Asia Director at Amnesty International.

    On 23 September [2014] Russian media reported the discoveries of “mass graves” in Komunar and Nyzhnya Krynka, two adjacent villages in the Donetsk Region, which until two days previously, had been held by Kyiv-controlled forces. They described the discovery of women’s bodies with signs of torture and the body of a pregnant woman. Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, was reported later as saying that more than 400 bodies had been discovered in the graves in this area and calling for international investigations.

    An Amnesty International delegation visited the area on 26 September. The delegation found strong evidence implicating Kyiv-controlled forces in the extrajudicial executions of four men buried in two graves near the village of Komunar. Five further bodies buried in a single grave nearby were revealed to belong to separatist fighters. Amnesty International spoke to members of their unit who said they had been killed in the course of hostilities.