Yet, there are voices, not many but some of which are substantial, that raise troubling questions about the most recent “war crimes” narrative, whether at Bucha or even more recently, the train station at Kramatorsk. First, there is former Ambassador Jack Matlock, America’s last representative in the old Soviet Union before it collapsed in 1991, for the administrations of Reagan and George H. W. Bush. A longtime career diplomat and expert on Russian history and politics, in an interview on CNN (which appears to have been subsequently scrubbed) Matlock cautioned viewers: “Firstly, we don’t know exactly what really happened in Bucha, and secondly, there is no evidence that Moscow is to blame.” The Russian government (via spokesman Dmitri Peskov), Foreign Minister (Sergei Lavrov), and the Ministry of Defense have all strongly denied the accusation and requested an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council and a full forensic investigation by a neutral party. As Davis adds: “There is no doubt that they [the Russians] have killed many Ukrainian citizens [many of whom were armed]. However…unless Russian commanders lost control of their troops in Bucha, the indiscriminate slaughter of unarmed civilians, following an agreed withdrawal and their identification as non-combatants, makes no sense either from a military or propaganda perspective. It serves only to undermine the peace negotiations…prolonging the conflict is in the US-led NATO alliance’s interests, not Russia’s.” That is the same question I have. If you are commanding Russian forces—if you are sitting in the Kremlin—and surely understand the immense value of international opinion and the very real history of Ukrainian disinformation (as in the case of the Mariupol Maternity Hospital bombing) and the use by the Western media of what is essentially propaganda, why would you commit such an atrocity in full and plain view, with bodies of men strewn almost symmetrically down a main street in the town [cf. the aerial photo at the beginning of this essay]? https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2022/04
