Watch: Ukrainian police force video casts doubt on Bucha ‘war crimes’ allegations

A YouTube video uploaded by the Ukrainian Police Force on 2 April casts doubt on claims of war crimes against Bucha civilians by Russian forces.

Russian officials denied the allegations, claiming it was an event staged by Kiev in the days after their forces had left the area. Images distributed widely on Western media appeared to show the victim’s bodies had been recently killed, due to the fact rigor mortis was not apparent and exhibited fresh blood injuries. Russia has called an extraordinary meeting of the UN Security Council over the incident.

Russian forces pulled out of Bucha on 30 March, as part of an agreed general withdrawal of troops from the Kiev area reached during ongoing negotiations between the two countries’ diplomats. On that day the mayor of Bucha stated on a live social media video that all Russian troops had been cleared from the city. He made no mention of the war crimes in that address.

Bucha is a small city just outside Kiev, about the same size as Gisborne, with a population of 36,000.

News of the alleged war crime broke on 4 April (NZ Time). Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described ‘bodies lying the streets of the suburbs of Irpin and Hostomel as well as Bucha.’ According to a report by AP (published by Stuff.co.nz), the bodies of 410 people had been found at various points around Bucha, including a group of 9 scattered around a site allegedly used by Russian troops as a base.

It is hardly credible that Russian forces would commit such atrocities as they were withdrawing from the area as part of an agreed peace negotiation process, and knowing that the eyes of the world are on them. It also does not seem likely that the mayor of Bucha, nor the rest of the world for that matter, wouldn’t have known hundreds of civilian dead bodies lay on the streets of his small city on 30 March, or for the next five days.

On the other hand, Ukrainian neo-Nazi ultranationalists have everything to gain from staging such an event, as they seek to prolong the war and secure NATO intervention and win the battle for Western public opinion.

No mention of the atrocities was made in the Ukrainian Police Force video, or discovery of hundreds of dead bodies recorded. The video shows police clearing streets and meeting people in various parts of Bucha two days after the Russian withdrawal.

Many commenters noted the fact that no bodies ‘were in the streets’ as the media had claimed, and nor did any of the civilians recorded in the video talk about the wanton murder of civilians (translated):

Ummm one question … Where are all the bodies that all our media are trumpeting about? The National Police was the first to enter Bucha, and then there was not a single body on the street (except for the first seconds) … And after entering, well, the police were already asking the media, and suddenly terrible shots appeared …

Such a happy old lady at 7 minutes, not a drop of grief on her face, nor any regret.

Great! Thank you for the video… now it’s clear when the corpses appeared on the streets… after this cleansing [by the Ukrainian Police Force].

This is not the police. These are jesters and clowns)) there is no Russian Federation Armed Forces in the city and they behave so calmly. And where are the civilian bodies? Where?

And why did the purge begin after the Russian troops left? From whom did they clean it? And why is there not a single corpse of civilians that everyone is talking about today? Or did they appear after this sweep? Weird.

The same question as everyone else: where were those killed on the way at the time of the entry of the Armed Forces of Ukraine? The dead appeared later, under the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The state should protect citizens, not kill without trial and investigation!

What happened? The Armed Forces of Ukraine took the abandoned city on the 2nd without corpses on the streets? Then why did a mountain of corpses appear on the streets on the 3rd after their cleansing? It turns out that during the night they shot all those who disagreed without trial or investigation?

The Russian servicemen left Bucha on March 30, and on March 31, the mayor of Bucha stated on a video from the city that there was no Russian army in the city. A member of the Buchi city council posted a video on social media from April 3, and there are no bodies of civilians on the streets. How was it possible for these images of bodies to appear four days later? Where was the Ukrainian army and journalists all this time? Finally, why did the Ukrainian nationalist and former colleague of Tesak, Sergey “Botsman” Korotkikh, remove the video from social networks, on which these words are clearly distinguishable: “And the boys without blue armbands, can I shoot at them?” In a word, we have another staged action, to which Ukrainian media workers had a hand, and immediately abandoned in the editorial office of all Western media.

Why are there no corpses on the streets in this video?