Bucha massacres: crisis actors again ...

[Physics Guy]

That's my idea as well. The clumsiness of the denials may likewise indicate that the Russian higher authorities aren't so much spinning a cunning web of disinformation as blindly stonewalling about things they don't actually know one way or the other because their own passage of information has broken down badly.

[MeDotOrg]

[The Russians are] in the kind of incompetent panic that perpetrates war crimes for which there isn't even any conceivable purpose.

War crimes of the kind we have here seem to me not to be so much signs of a formidable Russian army committed to the ruthless pursuit of frightening aims, but a further sign, if we needed it, of an army that is badly led and has low morale.

In a well-trained and effectively officered army, soldiers are not let loose on the civil population to murder and rape people. Why? Because such behaviour is not generally useful in achieving military objectives, and tends to reduce the morale and efficiency of a unit. Good officers at the platoon and company levels don't let this kind of thing happen. But the poor combat performance of the Russian infantry strongly suggests that it does not have good officers at that level. These are badly led, resentful and frightened conscripts, and this kind of behaviour is what you get when that is the case.

Perhaps the most brutal war crimes by a modern industrialized country were committed by Japan in the occupation of China. One element common to both Japan and Russia's military structure: crap runs downhill. Common to both was brutal discipline and rigid hierarchies. That environment encourages the average rank and file soldier to consider the prisoner as being responsible for his own miserable state of affairs. The husband hits the wife, who slaps the kid, who kicks the dog, the prisoner being the dog.

The most troubling difference is that the Japanese thought the Chinese were racially inferior, while the Ukrainians are ostensibly the Slavic brothers of the Russians. The world is seeing what it is like to be liberated by Russian brothers. What country would now enter into a willing partnership with such a nation?

The irony is that the motivation for the war was a perceived threat to Russia's existence. But by initiating the war, Putin has thrown gasoline on the fire of his country's demise. Even if he is able to walk away with the fig leaf of some territory, the war has irrevocably weakened Russia internally and externally. The atrocities are what happens when you put a rifle into the hands of someone at the ass end of an unsuccessful totalitarian state.