Below I recommended two articles about the occupation of Bucha, one from the Journal, the second from Der Spiegel. They are really best read together because they tell different but complementary stories. The first is more about an indisciplined and corrupt army which resorted to escalating brutality and killings as they became both more convinced the population was the Ukrainian Army against them and also more angry about their military failure. The second article gives more focus to mass killings as matters of policy, particularly military aged men and various local notables on lists of politicians, local leaders, former or possible future soldiers, anyone defined as a ‘nationalist’. The power of reading them together is that you get a sense of how both things were happening, both were feeding on each other.

Here is a great companion piece to the Journal article on Bucha that I linked to earlier. It’s from Der Spiegel. But it’s in English. It’s a very different sort of article but largely lines up in the story it tells. There’s quite a lot here, a lot of it hard to read. But I wanted to draw your attention to one passage which drives home just how critical the very early battlefield successes of the Ukrainian Army were to galvanizing the resistance of the Ukrainian population (emphasis added) …

I hope you’ve had a chance to read Josh Kovensky’s exclusive about the DC feds impersonators. Normally we wouldn’t be terribly interested in whether someone’s rents were months or years in arrears. But in this case it makes this story even more baffling and mysterious. We’ve been wondering for a couple days, Who was behind this? Where’d the money come from? As Josh reports, it wasn’t coming from anywhere. Because these guys never paid rent at all. The landlord eventually sued them but when it came time to evict they were protected by COVID-era eviction moratoriums.

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.”

We’re following various leads on the DC Secret Service/impersonation caper. Some of them are quite, quite weird. But the most interesting thing about this case so far is how little information we know. The raids in this story happened two days ago, Wednesday afternoon. Normally in a case like this — apparent espionage, probable corruption involving the Secret Service — we’d be seeing a steady stream of articles revealing new details of the plot. But there’s close to nothing. I get the sense that’s because the DOJ and the FBI don’t really know themselves. Or at least, they didn’t yesterday.