World Affairs Brief, April 8, 2022 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.
Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).

The Claims of Russian Genocide:

In the town of Bucha, 23 miles NW of Kiev, Ukrainian soldiers found bodies evenly spaced out on the ground with their hands tied behind their back, shot and killed. Russia claims the bodies were staged that way and killed by others to cast blame on Russia—a claim American conservatives have echoed and championed. However, there are two pieces of evidence that counter Russia’s claim of innocence.

The first is from German intelligence who say they have intercepted phone conversations from Russian-backed mercenaries discussing the killings before the Russians left. The Daily Mail has the story:

The barbaric atrocities at Bucha were part of a deliberate Kremlin strategy carried out in part by the feared Wagner Group of mercenaries, intercepted Russian radio transmissions have revealed.

Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, has heard messages from Putin’s forces discussing the brutal murder of civilians in the city of horrors outside Kyiv, which was recaptured by Ukraine over the weekend.

The transmissions have been linked to specific corpses seen in Bucha, with one soldier talking about how he and his colleagues shot dead someone on a bicycle, while another said: ‘First question soldiers, then shoot them.’

But the more definitive evidence are the Maxar satellite photos of the bodies in the streets while Bucha was still being occupied by the Russians. Reuters reports:

“High-resolution Maxar satellite imagery collected over Bucha, Ukraine verifies and corroborates recent social media videos and photos that reveal bodies lying in the streets and left out in the open for weeks,” Maxar said in an e-mail to Reuters, which also included analysis of the images.

Jeffrey Lewis, a satellite imagery expert who has seen the Maxar images, described the process of deducing what the images meant as “very straightforward… You see pictures on the ground that show bodies relative to cars and buildings, and in satellite images, you can see the lumps on the ground in the same position next to the same cars and buildings.

“What the satellite images show is that the bodies were present while the Russians controlled the area,” said Lewis.