War implies crime, by definition, and civilians are invariably the most vulnerable victims of the process. This has been the case since the Peloponnese, through the Napoleonic takeover of Europe, the British colonial massacres, the genocidal campaign of the Nazis and the Soviet revenge against it.
Of course, there are laws of war. But few things are as ignored as regulations in the heat of battle, which also embed the human factor, training and ideological leanings. The My Lai massacre, in which Americans killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in 1968 in Vietnam, is an example of this.
From the evidence so far, there is little doubt that what happened in Butcha, Irpin and other cities on the outskirts of Kiev was a war crime in the classic assertion: deliberate attacks on unarmed civilians. Mass graves are horrendous, but they don’t necessarily constitute evidence. People tied up and shot in the head, yes.
The problem is diverse, and it embodies the hypocrisy that the nature of what happened in Butcha is ultimately irrelevant. Even assuming the Kremlin’s hypothesis that sounds fanciful, that it was all a setup to incriminate Moscow, the knot is the impossibility of an objective investigation.
It has always been like that. War stories are written by their victors. Were the Bosnian Serbs indisputably the victors in the bloody struggle of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, Srebenica might not be seen today as a monument to the perpetuity of the concept of ethnic cleansing.
Obviously, remembering the past does not mean justifying the present. There have been crimes in Butcha and beyond, apparently perpetrated by Russians. But there is no independent investigation possible to establish what happened, only the accounts of survivors and the story Kiev wants to tell.
As Ukraine is as draconian as Russia in its censorship of the work of journalists in the war, even being the object of formal protests by professionals from its own country, this veil will hardly be lifted while the fog of conflict is in the air. Maybe it never will.
Therefore, it is only natural that Volodymyr Zelensky raises the temperature and shouts that there has been genocide in Butcha. In doing so, he equips the West in its hitherto unsuccessful crusade to punish Vladimir Putin for his aggression against Ukraine with economic sanctions.
The fact that Ukrainians are far from holiness in their military actions and narrative manipulations does not validate the opposite, of course, but it does help to provide context.
One particularly intriguing point is the idea that the Russians left evidence of crimes having a few days to abandon their positions, as they had announced they would. Obviously, the desire to provoke terror cannot be discounted without worrying about the consequences of an international justice that only works for a few.
Mariupol, almost forgotten as a Western symbol of a campaign to see Putin arrested in The Hague, is there to show such a willingness.
Ironically, the Russian, thus himself, has been having trouble in his campaign for a domestic legalist trap. By not declaring war against Ukraine, but a “special military operation”, the Kremlin was prevented from draining at will the human resources that a national mobilization would guarantee.
It was a political move, it seems, based on the assumption that Putin predicted a short and successful war. Applying tactical misconceptions, placing armored columns against light infantry well-armed with fatal anti-tank missiles, and dispersing forces, he suffered the known setbacks.
In the estimation of several analysts, in terms of equipment Moscow lost perhaps 30 of the 125 tactical battalions involved in the action, which does not mean corresponding human casualties (which would be a huge 24% of 200,000 men). But it’s a heavy blow.
Working with the uniforms at hand and on the eve of seeing 134,000 conscripts go home and be replaced by untrained youths, in the biennial rotation of its forces, Moscow has had to regroup. He has let the use of Syrian and other mercenaries be advertised, but militarily they can’t make much of a difference.
The partial withdrawal from the Kiev surroundings and the announced concentration of forces in the east, the Donbass, also suggest the will to consolidate the process of partitioning Ukraine. But it may indicate the idea of ​​a war of months, perhaps years, aimed at subjugating the entire country, at who knows what human cost.
With Putin’s clear need to bring home some sort of victory, and the existential risk this poses for Zelensky, Butcha could ultimately turn just one chapter in the list of atrocities in this war.
