A Must Read

I want to strongly commend this article in The Wall Street Journal on Bucha to your attention. It’s very hard to read and also a near masterpiece of narrative reporting. We’ve all seen the pictures and the horrors of this town. And there’s been claims of organized mass killing and even a plan of organized genocide. This account provides a more complicated but no less horrifying account. As we’ve heard from other towns, Russian soldiers were initially reasonably behaved and even polite to Ukrainian civilians in the town. Some confided with locals that they weren’t sure why they were there or what the point of the war was. But over time discipline began to break down. And Russian soldiers became increasingly suspicious that Ukrainian civilians were communicating their positions to Ukrainian soldiers and irregulars. This became a bigger concern as the Russian offensive bogged down. “They saw a spotter in every person who lived on the fifth floor,” one Bucha resident told the Journal, “They saw a commando in each of us.”