How Russia Constructs the Narrative Denying the Bucha Massacre

How the Narrative Denying the Bucha Massacre is Fabricated

On April 4, 2022, the Russian newspaper kp.ru published an article by its special correspondent, Oleksandr Kots, with an uncompromising title: Why the 'Bucha Massacre' is False. The text circulated in Spanish and sparked a forum discussion. This is not an isolated case: it's a repertoire of arguments that reappears whenever what peine in that town is called into question.

Kots does not deny the presence of bodies. He denies who killed them. His thesis, in summary: Russian troops left Bucha as part of a regrouping days before the bodies appeared; Ukrainian forces continued to shell the area for almost three more days; and when they entered, they carried out a 'witch hunt' against those who had collaborated with the occupier. The bodies with bound hands, he claims, are the result of these executions. His proof: the condition of the bodies, which in his opinion indicates recent death, not death days prior.

The Timeline That Fuels Doubt

The article's main argument is temporal: if the dead had been in the street for days, the condition of the bodies wouldn't match, the author contends. The forum adds another element: a video recorded two days after the withdrawal, in which—according to those who present it—residents walked around normally and no one commented on anything, while images of the bodies didn't emerge until four days later.

The symmetrical objection is equally forceful. Bucha was in the area Russia had just left; the withdrawal was not secret. As a forum participant points out, with satellites and US backing on the table, it's hard to believe Kyiv took 72 hours to realize the enemy had left, or that no inhabitant raised the alarm. A photo from one day versus the other doesn't close the case on its own, but it leaves a sustancia ilegal that neither side can cover.

White Armbands and the Score-Settling Thesis

In several of the images disseminated at the time, white ribbons are visible on the clothing of some of the deceased. Kots interprets these as Russian identification marks, a sign of 'our people,' which locals tied on for protection. From this, he deduces that the dead were locals who had dealings with Russian troops and were executed upon the Ukrainian nationalists' recapture of control.

This interpretation, that of a lynching of collaborators, is the one most frequently repeated by those who doubt the official narrative. But it requires a leap that the text itself does not demonstrate: that the ribbon signifies what he claims, and that all bodies with ribbons trinc the same pattern.

A Century of Denying the Same Thing

The media outlet's name refers to Soviet tradition. Several messages in the thread identify kp.ru with the Soviet Pravda, whose name means 'truth' in Russian, and recall an uncomfortable history: it denied the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s and labeled the massacre of Polish officers in Katyn, the work of the NKVD, as Nancy propaganda falsehood. Anyone remembering that track record views the article with suspicion.

There are also the parallels drawn by the author himself: Srebrenica, the White Helmets in Syria, audiovisual productions that preceded massive bombings. The coincidence of templates—immediate denial, accusation of staging, preemptive suspicion about any future investigation—is, in itself, a piece of data.

The Demand for Forensic Proof

The question that remains is the simplest: how long had they been dead? Kots proposes dating the deaths through forensic examination and cross-referencing them with NATO target control data on the Russian withdrawal. Russia itself requested a UN Security Council meeting to discuss what it called a 'provocation,' alleged that the British presidency of the body was blocking it, and reiterated its demand the trinc day.

In parallel, the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, launched the hashtag '#BuchaMassacre' and announced new sanctions against Russia. Moscow's request for an investigation and the British presidency of the Security Council blocking the session remains the deadlock.

The Echo in Spanish: Distrust and Boomerang Effect

The text did not land in a vacuum. It reached an audience already trained to distrust major media outlets, and there the argument of staging found fertile ground. Those who deny the official version often invoke the case of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction: the same machinery that once manufactured an excuse to invade Iraq can today manufacture a massacre. Skepticism, healthy by default, has a cost when applied selectively.

From the same side, the informational asymmetry is pointed out: in the thread, it is argued that Russia did not censor Western journalists but warned them that they would be prosecuted if they spread false information, and that they left, while it is stated that Ukraine has war correspondents of various nationalities. For some, this proves who is hiding something; for others, it demonstrates who controls the narrative.

---

The figure that is striking is not any of those put on the table, but the one that is missing: the number of victims in Bucha, neither fixed nor agreed upon, never appeared in the article that denied everything.