Ukrainian troops entering the city of Bucha, 25km north-west of the capital Kyiv, have reportedly found evidence of what appear to be horrific war crimes committed during the month-long occupation by Russian forces. Having forced the Russian troops out of the area, any jubilation at the victory was cut short by what appeared to be mass graves, civilian corpses with their hands ziplocked behind their backs and evidence of women who had been raped and murdered.
“Now the world can see what the Russian military did in Bucha,” Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told the United Nations. But Russia’s UN envoy, Vassily Nebenzya, dismissed the claims, saying they were a “staged provocation”.
Atrocities committed during wartime are of course nothing new, but the Russian denial in particular brings one to the fore: the massacre at Katyn Forest in eastern Poland during the second world war, which the Soviet Union successfully passed off as a Nazi atrocity for half a century.
