The atrocities

We've all seen the horrific images from Bucha, showing the corpses of murdered civilians littering the streets (many with hands tied behind their backs), and the reports of a mass grave which may contain as many as three hundred more bodies.  We've seen the reports of rape on a huge scale by Russian troops in the occupied areas of Ukraine.  And there's evidence that even at the very beginning, when the Russians expected a fast and near-bloodless victory, they were planning mass killings in Ukraine.  Surrender was never an option.

Bucha is a residential suburb of Kyiv.  It was probably a lot like where you live.  A few weeks ago those people whose bodies now lie in the streets were probably focusing on their kids' school grades and making their car payments and whether to ask the boss for a raise and suchlike.

In response to Russia's absurd claims that the Ukrainians staged the whole scene, scattering the corpses after liberating Bucha, satellite imagery shows that the bodies have been lying exactly where they are since March 19, and in some cases since March 11.  That is, not only did the Russians murder these people, they left the bodies lying where they fell for two to three weeks, until they were driven from Bucha -- as, presumably, a grisly warning to other locals to submit to Russian rule without complaint.

It's unlikely that Bucha is an exceptional case.  It would be a hell of a coincidence if there were only one place in Ukraine where the Russians had committed such atrocities and that one place just happened to be the first area the Ukrainians liberated from them.  More likely there are scenes like this in many occupied towns that haven't been revealed yet because the Russians are still in control there.  Indeed, a few similar images have come in from other liberated areas.  All this combines with what we've already seen -- the attacks on hospitals, the bombing of a theater clearly marked as sheltering children, the indiscriminate artillery and missile attacks on cities -- to complete the picture of the kind of war Putin is waging.

We cannot impose a no-fly zone or otherwise risk direct NATO-Russia combat, but we need to pull out all the stops in giving the Ukrainians all the weapons they need to drive the Russians out, and in ratcheting up sanctions to the utter ruin of the Russian economy.  This war is no longer only about democracy or national sovereignty, important though those things still are.  It's about basic humanity in the face of barbarism worthy of a Hitler or a Stalin.