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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   33237 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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I think it's fairly realistic to assume that many (maybe most?) of the civilian dead in Bucha who were shown on Western media were killed by Ukrainian units who reentered the town in retribution.

Uh...why would you assume that? What could possibly make that more likely?

It's more likely than the notion that all local civilian death were caused by the Russians. Also, many of the dead provably had white armbands, which at the time was already pretty much established to be the marker of local collaborators.

I wasn’t asking about all deaths. Why do you think “many or most” were killed by Ukrainians?

It is possible that the Ukrainian military slaughtered dozens or hundreds of their own citizens on reclaiming an unoccupied town. It is unlikely that they did so while encouraging foreign journalists to come document the scene as a propaganda coup. I find it much more likely that the invading army happened to kill some civilians to keep order or for sport. That’s an incredibly common human behavior.

As far as I know, the first press reports appeared days after the town was retaken. I think it's entirely possible that the Ukrainian units shot dozens of suspected or real collaborators as soon as they entered, killings which they very obviously blamed all on the Russians, and the Western press was happy to believe them. I also think it's rather likely that most of the local civilians that died did so as collateral damage during combat, mostly shelling. None of that means that the Russians didn't commit local atrocities.

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