Unlike other horrors of the war in Ukraine, such as the bombing of a maternity hospital, the smashing of a theater where people sheltered, or the shelling of apartment buildings, the killings in Bucha could not be labeled accidental damage or easily explained by the Russians. denied. as a means of propaganda.
“What’s different here is you have images of civilians with their hands tied up and executed — that’s a very different kind of crime,” said Alex Whiting, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who has worked on prosecuting international war crimes. “This looks very much like a crime.”
Rachel Denber, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division, which has collected evidence of war crimes in Ukraine, said the killings caused so much shock, in part because many of the other civilian deaths in the war were caused by indiscriminate shelling and bombing – although that is no less an atrocity.
“I think one of the reasons people react differently to these bodies on the ground is the suspicion that these victims weren’t random, they were intentional,” she said.
When Russia launched its invasion on February 24, there were widespread expectations that its superior force would soon subdue Ukraine. But meeting fierce Ukrainian resistance, the Russians soon resorted to large-scale bombing and missile strikes, making little or no distinction between civilian and military targets, and razing some towns and villages in whole or in part.
In some ways, legal experts said, the images of civilians being shot at close range convey a more personal malice.
“I suppose at some level you see a city destroyed, you think things like this happen in war,” said Andrew Clapham, a professor of international law at the Geneva Graduate Institute who advises the Ukrainian government. “People kind of suspend their horror and say it might be explainable in wartime.”