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Thank you for other examples as it better illustrates the web of belief for people who believe it, but to be frank, as a general rule I'm pretty skeptical believing people who think their cause is existential in nature because one who thinks this also places the cause above honesty, and then on top of it the Ukrainians have a years long history of just laughably ridiculous lies (which the BBC amplifies regularly).
It's been clear from the beginning there was a large and growing chasm between what various factions believed as reality on the ground in Ukraine and it's been unbridgeable most of the time and it's made dialogue about it difficult. As reality comes crashing through the propaganda as things start to fall apart over there, it's making real dialogue about the conflict possible again.
Do you generally believe that "an invading, occupying army commits atrocities" is by definition so improbable that it warrants a basic assumption that such claims are propaganda?
I think it regularly happens and it is regularly lied about, so these claims should be met with enhanced skepticism which can be satisfied with a low amount of evidence.
But I'm unsure why this abstracted statement would mean much in this particular circumstance. I know many specifics about the parties, about the claims, and about the available evidence (at least in the Bucha scenario). I remember the emerging story and the contradictory videos and pictures.
If I think the Ukrainians lied about Bucha, I'm not going to believe any further claims about other "atrocities" without a fair amount of independently verified evidence. The BBC repeating "Ukrainians found X" is nowhere near that standard.
I don't particularly blame the Ukrainians for the comical levels of lying because they believe they're in an existential war, but a casualty of that is they have no credibility.
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Of course not. Is it not also possible that a country that has engaged in false propaganda to engender support might lie about atrocities that again helps generate support?
That is, one should not believe that Russia is unlikely to commit atrocities (there almost certainly were some as its war) but also one should not believe the Ukrainians that something truly awful beyond the normal cruelty of war occurred.
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I think this gloss you are using is abstracting away too much detail. You can remove detail from almost any scenario to make it not sound "improbable by definition" - imagine if I told you that Donald Trump is a cannibal, and then if you were skeptical, I asked you if you generally believe that "an omnivore avails itself of a source of animal protein" is by definition so improbable (...).
The combination of it being a small army controlling the area for a short amount of time, the ethnic similarity of the two peoples, the lack of claims of a proportional scale from other, larger places where the same army was in control for a longer amount of time, the conspicuous lack of independent verification and the incongruences in early evidence (such as, as I mentioned in another response, the white armbands on the depicted victims), and the existence of a means and motive for the Ukrainians to make it up (extremely friendly and uncritical media-NGO complex, the knowledge that rousing sufficient moral indignation in the Western public may be necessary and sufficient to win the war) and parallel anti-motive on the Russian side (they had enough trouble just fighting the Ukrainian military, and were equally aware that Western support weighs more than anything either Russia or Ukraine can bring to the table), together warrant the basic assumption.
I think this is very much in the eye of the beholder: Western progressives happily lump together "White" Poles and Germans, but that didn't stop any number of atrocities on the ground in WWII. They also wouldn't generally distinguish between "Black" Hutu and Tutsi in any context that wasn't directly related to the relevant genocide. From someone far away (maybe you are not, but I am), it's hard to qualify feelings on the ground. Surely those genetically similar, Abrahamic-religion-followers in the former British mandate of Palestine are getting along nicely.
Well, but this war was started and heavily propagandised on the basis of Ukrainians not being considered a separate people by the Russians. As a matter of fact, Putin's Chief of Staff is apparently half Ukrainian (and half Jewish). Russians sometimes have a measure of disrespect for them as "backwater swineherds", but it's not genocidal hatred - more people in either country have some relatives in the other than don't.
It appears that the average pro-war Russian's doublethink can perfectly reconcile "Ukrainians and Russians are the same people" and "fucking glass those salo-nazi khokhols already, I can't wait".
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