More than a year has passed since Russian troops invaded the town of Bucha in Ukraine. Serhiy Nuzhnenko was one of the first photojournalists to enter Bucha in the midst of the invasion. His before-and-after images show its striking restoration and the resilience of its residents.
In this paper, the authors provide an overview of the deaths incurred during the early weeks of the war and will attempt to illustrate the range of variables which will inform the practical response to recover and identify those killed, before they receive their final burial. It will introduce some of the organisations which have provided forensic support and will also identify emerging ethical considerations which should be monitored for the remainder of the conflict.
An AFP team were the first journalists to discover the horrors of Bucha, a quiet commuter town near Kyiv, occupied by the Russian army for over a month, where Russian troops are accused of massacring hundreds of civilians. This is Danny Kemp’s account of what they saw that day. Some may find it distressing.
"My brother sent this to me. Town of Bucha northwest of Kyiv. The amount of dead citizens on one street alone…I just can’t even process."
KYIV (7 December 2022) – In the initial weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, Russian armed forces summarily executed or carried out attacks on individuals leading to the deaths of hundreds of civilians, the Head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Matilda Bogner said today. A UN Human Rights report based on the work of the Mission details how Russian troops killed civilians in Ukrainian towns and villages across the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions of Ukraine from 24 February until 6 April 2022.
Bogner said the summary executions examined in the report may constitute a war crime. “There are strong indications that the summary executions documented in this report may constitute the war crime of willful killing,” she said.
Putin's claims that a treaty was ready and acceptable for Ukraine in the spring of 2022 but was rejected by Ukraine are highly unlikely. The documents displayed at the June 17 meeting are likely to have been working drafts. The positions of the parties were too far apart, and Russia was not likely to abide by a ceasefire. A treaty would have to be signed by the presidents, and subject to a referendum in Ukraine.
France has uncovered a major disinformation campaign by Russia, in which leading French media websites like Le Monde, Le Parisien and 20 Minutes have been imitated in order to spread fake news about the war in Ukraine. We tell you how to identify these fake news websites in this edition of Truth or Fake.
Claim: A pair of photographs shows the same location in Bucha, Ukraine, following Russia's withdrawal in April 2022 and roughly a year after efforts to rebuild were undertaken.
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The war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a ferocious battle of disinformation, waged in particular by pro-Russian agitators seeking to distort and shift the blame for many atrocities on the ground. They have sought to depict the Ukrainian side as Nazis or suggest that Western support for Kyiv is evaporating. Here are some of the main narratives, false or misleading, that have been fact-checked over the past year by AFP's digital verification teams.
The war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a ferocious battle of disinformation, waged in particular by pro-Russian agitators seeking to distort and shift the blame for many atrocities on the ground. They have sought to depict the Ukrainian side as Nazis or suggest that Western support for Kyiv is evaporating. Here are some of the main narratives, false or misleading, that have been fact-checked over the past year by AFP's digital verification teams.