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Instead of trying to suppress apparent evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, Russian state television inundated viewers with video of the Bucha massacre it calls a hoax.
For the past week, Russian television, which is under the full control of the government, has presented as fact the fictional version of events crafted by the state — that the bodies of murdered civilians discovered in Bucha last week were planted there after the Russian withdrawal. According to Russian news anchors, correspondents, and pundits, the apparent crime scene discovered after the Russian retreat was a monstrous plot to frame Russian soldiers as war criminals, carried out by Ukraine’s intelligence service and its Western partners.
To sustain the deception that the killings in Bucha happened after Russia’s four-week occupation ended, news broadcasts and discussion programs have rigorously avoided mentioning that the government’s story has been contradicted by drone footage, satellite images, and witness testimony. But the most surprising element of the coordinated effort to keep the Russian public from learning the truth is that the state television channels most Russians rely on for their news have reported incessantly on the video — showing dead bodies lining a street in the Kyiv suburb hour after hour.
Russian viewers, instead of being discouraged from seeing videos that implicate their soldiers in war crimes, have instead been forced to watch the brutal images of dead bodies lining the street of Bucha over and over — but always accompanied by conspiratorial claims that the victims were either actors, pretending to be dead, or people who were killed by Ukrainian forces after Russian forces left. In most cases, the video of more than a dozen bodies sprawled on the pavement along Bucha’s Yablonska Street was also stamped with the word “fake,” written in red letters in English and Russian.
As a result of this strategy, millions of Russians have been bombarded with images of Bucha’s dead and urged to direct their anger over the murders onto fictional Ukrainian or Western perpetrators, not the Russian soldiers who controlled the city when these civilians were gunned down.
That’s how the video of dead bodies on Yablonska Street was framed on the evening news on Russia’s Channel One. As the images that shocked the world were shown to Russian viewers last week, a news anchor in Moscow read a conspiratorial script that echoed the Russian Defense Ministry’s false claim that two of the bodies appeared to move before the clip was over, supposedly proving that the crime scene was faked with the use of actors.
“Pay attention,” the state television anchor instructed viewers, as parts of the video were replayed in slow motion. “One extra raises his hand, another stands up, apparently deciding that he has already played his role.”
In fact, as open-source researchers explained in viral tweets, a closer look at the original video — which was posted on YouTube on April 2 by Ukraine’s Espreso TV — showed that the bodies did not move at all. What some viewers misinterpreted as a person’s arm being raised was actually a speck of water on the car windshield the video was recorded through. And what looked to others like another body sitting up was in fact a distortion of the image of that body’s reflection seen in a convex mirror on the passenger side of the car.
But because access to Twitter has been blocked in Russia since last month — when independent television channels, radio stations, and websites were shuttered to keep unfiltered news about Ukraine from reaching the Russian public — most Russians who were subjected to this state television report probably remain unaware that these false claims were debunked within minutes of the broadcast. In the days that followed, the video of victims in Bucha, always labeled “fake,” played again and again on Russian state television shows dedicated to interpreting the news for the nation.
As Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring reported, the bodies appeared on huge screens on the set of one show as the host, Olga Skabeeva, presented an updated version of the conspiracy theory: the claim that the dead bodies were not those of actors but of local residents who had welcomed the Russian occupation and were then killed by the Ukrainian army when it regained control of the city.
Channeling the Russian Defense Ministry’s claim that “the bodies in the video seem to have been deliberately laid out to create a more dramatic picture,” Skabeeva also told viewers that the aim of the hoax supposedly staged by Ukraine and its Western allies was to create a “fake version of Srebrenica.”
The images of Bucha’s massacred civilians also played on a large screen last week behind Olesya Loseva, the host of “Time Will Tell,” which is described by the state broadcaster as a “sociopolitical talk show about what worries every Russian.”
Loseva told viewers that the Western-directed hoax had been staged in Bucha because U.S. President Joe Biden had recently called his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, “a butcher.” The Ukrainian city’s name, Loseva explained, sounds like the English word “butcher.”
The footage was still playing on a loop behind Loseva as she handed the floor to a guest, Gevorg Mirzayan, who teaches politics at Moscow’s Financial University. Mirzayan suggested that the staging of the fake crime scene in Bucha was probably done by British intelligence agents.
In 2018, the British government accused Russia of poisoning Sergei Skripal, a former Russian-British double agent living in England, with “a military-grade nerve agent.” Russia’s Foreign Ministry responded by claiming that British spies might have poisoned Skripal as part of a plot to tarnish Russia’s reputation ahead of the World Cup soccer tournament it was preparing to host that summer.
A month later, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, claimed Russia had “irrefutable evidence” that British agents had directed the staging of a chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma, which Russian officials insisted was a hoax intended to frame the Syrian government forces it was fighting alongside. Russia produced no evidence for that claim.
“Antifake” Is on the Case
Images of the supposed hoax at Bucha were also analyzed on “Antifake,” a new show that suddenly appeared last month as the Russian invasion of Ukraine stalled in the Kyiv suburbs, including Bucha. According to the state broadcaster, the show’s educational mission is to help viewers “distinguish lies from truth” in social media clips from Ukraine. “Videos that cause you a flurry of emotions, may, in fact, turn out to be soullessly and cynically manufactured fakes,” the show’s producers say. “Experts at ‘Antifake’ are sorting it out.”
The “Antifake” logo, prominently featured on its set, is an illustration of what seems at first to be a rabbit ready to be pulled from a hat, until the image is flipped upside down to reveal that it is actually a villainous con man in a top hat. That the drawing of the man’s features seems to echo anti-Semitic propaganda also connects it to a long tradition of virulent conspiracy theories.
The “Antifake” logo’s reference to a magic trick seems to be an unsubtle way of suggesting to viewers that they need to be wary of believing any images from social media or foreign news reports, which could be illusions designed to fool them. The irony seems to be lost on the producers that by using the show to trick Russian viewers into believing that genuine video of atrocities in Ukraine is fake, “Antifake” is itself part of a hoax.
The host of “Antifake,” Alexander Smol, introduced the episode on Bucha by telling viewers that the images from the town, which look like something from a horror movie, “are being cynically portrayed as Russian forces’ cruelty” as part of a Ukrainian and Western “infowar.” A rapid-cut montage then flashed up on screen, mixing images of the bodies with the show’s logo, set to menacing music.
After introducing his guests, Smol then screened video of the bodies on Yablonska Street, with the word “fake” in English and Russian written across the images.
One “Antifake” guest, Alexander Artamonov, the former editor of a government radio station, then echoed the Russian Defense Ministry’s claim that the scene was staged, observing that it looked to him as if the bodies had been carefully laid out for the media. No mention was made of the evidence, from satellite images and drone video, that the bodies on Yablonska Street were in those precise locations weeks before the Russian forces withdrew from Bucha.
As Artamonov spoke, video and photographs of the victims in Bucha recorded by Associated Press and Agence France-Presse journalists were also stamped “fake” in the background. This week, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, angrily accused “Western and primarily the U.S. media of not only spreading fake news and disinformation, but of being an accomplice in the massacre in Bucha.”
Zakharova went on to claim that correspondents from the West who reported evidence that the Bucha victims were, in fact, killed during the Russian occupation were akin to Nazi propagandists who knowingly exaggerated a Red Army massacre of dozens of German civilians in East Prussia in 1944. Then she suggested that massacres carried out in recent decades by Russia’s Serbian and Syrian allies were also hoaxes staged by Western authorities. “Wasn’t it the same in Srebrenica?” Zakharova asked, according to an official transcript. “Or in Aleppo and Douma in Syria? Absolutely the same. Who is paying for this? The sponsors are Washington, London, and the collective Brussels.”
In another part of “Antifake,” Smol recapped the Russian Defense Ministry’s claim that it was deeply suspicious that three full days had elapsed between the day it said its troops left Bucha, March 30, and April 3, when the video of more than a dozen bodies on Yablonska Street was posted on Twitter by Ukraine’s military. But the producers of “Antifake” and other Russian state television shows misled viewers about the date when the video of the bodies they played on a loop was actually recorded.
In fact, the video was posted on Twitter on April 2 by a member of Ukraine’s parliament and then broadcast on Ukrainian television at 7:03 p.m. that night. Video of that April 2 Ukrainian TV broadcast was distributed by Russia’s Defense Ministry.
Journalists from the AP and AFP also recorded video and photographs of dead bodies on Yablonska Street on the afternoon of April 2. Those images were also incorrectly dated April 3 by the producers of “Antifake,” who showed them with the “fake” stamp.
It matters that Russian viewers were repeatedly misled about what date the video from Bucha was recorded because Russia’s Defense Ministry built its case that the crime scene had been staged on the supposed gap between the departure of its forces and the discovery of the bodies.
Smol also showed viewers video Russia’s Defense Ministry had called proof that things were fine in Bucha when its soldiers left: a video statement from Bucha’s mayor, Anatolii Fedoruk, in which he said that March 31 would go down in history as the date the Russian occupation of the city had ended. But Russian officials and “Antifake” incorrectly reported that this video was recorded by the mayor that same day, March 31.
The mayor’s message to Bucha’s citizens was, in fact, posted on the city council’s Facebook page the evening of April 1. And the mayor said that the previous day, March 31, was the day the city was liberated from the Russian occupiers, not March 30.
Russian officials, and state television, said the fact that the mayor made no mention of dead bodies on Bucha’s streets in his brief statement was somehow proof that the victims had not yet been shot. However, another local official did mention the bodies of the dead in a video he posted on the same city Facebook page the morning of April 1.
In that Facebook video, the secretary of Bucha’s city council, Taras Shapravsky, advised residents who had fled Bucha that the town was not yet entirely free of Russian troops. Shapravsky then specifically warned everyone to avoid the corpses on the streets. “Do not touch the bodies of the dead, which have been lying for a long time,” Shapravsky said. “There is a high probability that they are mined.”
Despite this evidence showing that the timeline laid out by Russia’s Defense Ministry is false, Russian officials and state television have continued to mislead the public by claiming that the video of the bodies on Yablonska Street did not appear until Bucha had been back under Ukrainian control for four days.
Russian television has also concealed from viewers that an earlier clip of the bodies on Yablonska Street was uploaded to Instagram the evening of April 1. Copies of that video appeared the same night on Facebook, Telegram, YouTube, and Twitter and quickly went viral.
While Russian television has obsessively focused on the recording from that street that emerged on April 2, the earlier video shows that this crime scene in Bucha was first recorded the same day the city’s mayor announced that the Russian troops were gone.
The comment at the start of that video, which seems to have been first posted on Instagram by a local government official from the neighboring city of Irpin, conveys a sense of stunned horror from the man recording it. “If you say that Russian soldiers are … humans,” the person filming the bodies says before trailing off.
Meduza, a news organization run by Russian journalists in Latvia, obtained drone footage of Yablonska Street recorded on March 23, during the Russian occupation, and compared it with the video posted online on April 1. Meduza’s visual analysis shows that at least seven of the bodies discovered on the street on April 1 were seen in the same positions on March 23.
As Zakharova’s comments suggested, the Russian government’s response to the evidence that its soldiers committed atrocities in Bucha echoes its response to the evidence that its Syrian allies did so in 2018. Russia has a long track record of promoting what are essentially versions of the same conspiracy theory — that whatever crime its government is implicated in was actually an elaborate hoax set up by its enemies.
That’s how Russian officials, and state television, responded in 2014, when Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people passengers. They told the Russian public a version of the same tale in 2020 when the leading Russian opposition figure, Alexey Navalny, was poisoned with Novichok, a neurotoxin developed in the Soviet Union. Three men with ties to Russian military and intelligence agencies, were later indicted for shooting down MH17 by international prosecutors. After Navalny survived the assassination attempt, he tricked a Russian intelligence agent into admitting that he was part of a team that had tried to kill him.
Last week, an “Antifake” guest, Grigory Pernavsky, argued that the supposed Bucha hoax seemed to echo what Russia still insists was a fake chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma in 2018. In that case, Russia claimed, incorrectly, that the only evidence of a chemical attack was video of children being doused with water by rescue workers in an area held by Syrian rebels until the next day. (In fact, the main evidence of an attack was video recorded in another location that showed a chlorine gas canister that was dropped on a building where dozens of victims were found.)
In an effort to shield Syrian government forces from blame for the chemical attack in Douma, Russia’s military and Russian state television claimed, without credible evidence, that Syrian rebels and the Syria Civil Defence, known as the White Helmets, had staged the scene of the children being treated as part of a hoax. As Pernavsky spoke, video of one of those Syrian children, 11-year-old Hassan Diab, being treated for suspected exposure to chemicals appeared on screen and was also stamped “fake.”
Pernavsky claimed that the chemical attack indeed “turned out to be fake” and that “even the Western side is trying not to talk about it anymore.” In fact, an independent investigation of the attack in Douma by experts in chemical warfare from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons concluded that a toxic chemical, most likely chlorine, was used. James Harkin, the director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, similarly concluded that a chemical attack did take place in a detailed reconstruction of the attack for The Intercept, and expert analysis of the visual evidence by Forensic Architecture and the New York Times suggested that chlorine gas canisters were dropped from the air in an area where the skies were under the total control of Syria and Russia.
As The Intercept reported in the aftermath of the attack in Douma, after the town came under the control of the Russian military, young Hassan was located and secretly brought to a Syrian military facility to be interviewed by Russian state television war correspondent Evgeny Poddubnyy. Although the boy’s testimony, offered under extraordinary pressure, did not actually show that the chemical attack had been staged, Russian state television claimed that it did.
The boy was then taken by Russian officials to the Hague for a news conference at the headquarters of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, where they claimed that his account proved Russia’s case that the attack had been a hoax, staged by the rebels. Russian officials acted as if the video of Hassan and the other children was the only evidence of a chemical attack in Douma, which was entirely untrue. But the myth that the boy’s testimony proved the Russian case has been treated as fact for four years on Russian state television, where the case is repeatedly cited as evidence that Western intelligence is constantly engaged in staging events to frame Russia.
On Monday, Poddubnyy, who was embedded with Russian forces outside Kyiv before their retreat, appeared on a state news channel and falsely claimed that the victims of the Bucha massacre were a mix of actors and civilians killed by Ukrainian soldiers after the Russians withdrew.
One accidental expert on the persuasive power of Russian state television’s campaign is the jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Cut off from the internet, Navalny reported in a message smuggled out of the prison where he is being held that “an ordinary Russian TV viewer (one of whom I currently am)” was being overwhelmed by disinformation that there had been a “massacre by Ukrainian Nazis in Bucha.”
Navalny described his shock at seeing a news anchor on Russian state television’s main news show report as fact the bizarre speculation that Bucha was chosen as the place to stage a fake massacre because the city’s name sounds like the English word “butcher.”
“I’m telling you,” Navalny commented, “the monstrosity of lies on federal channels is unimaginable. And, unfortunately, so is its persuasiveness for those who have no access to alternative information.”
“The endlessly squealing anchors and their ‘experts’ are revving up their fury and have long since surpassed the military in their aggressiveness,” the jailed anti-corruption activist added. “They demand a war to the bitter end, storming Kyiv, bombing Lviv. Even the prospect of a nuclear war does not scare them. They mop up the floor with their fellow Putinists on live television if they as much as hint at the fact that peace talks are a good thing.”
“It’s such a disgusting uroboros,” Navalny wrote. “Politics is a propaganda snake biting its own tail. Propagandists create the kind of public opinion that no longer simply allows Putin to commit war crimes, but demands them of him.”
President Joe Biden answers questions from reporters before boarding Air Force One in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday. (photo: Chris May/The New York Times)
The efforts come at a particularly urgent moment: Moscow appears to be preparing for a new assault in eastern Ukraine that could prove devastatingly bloody to both sides, while mounting reports of atrocities make plain the brutality of the Kremlin’s tactics.
As Russia presents a sanitized version of the war, Ukrainian activists have been sending messages highlighting government corruption and incompetence in an effort to undermine faith in the Kremlin.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-funded but independent news organization founded decades ago, is trying to push its broadcasts deeper into Russia. Its Russian-language articles are published on copies of its websites called “mirrors,” which Russian censors seek out in a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole. Audience numbers have surged during the war despite the censorship.
U.S. organizations are also promoting the use of software that allows Russian citizens to leap over the nascent firewall erected by the Kremlin to control internet access.
The efforts face high barriers as the Kremlin tightens controls on journalists and the internet, passing laws that have forced the closure of independent media outlets, like the Echo of Moscow. President Vladimir Putin is doing all he can to keep Russians in the dark about Europe’s largest land war since 1945, with casualties going largely unreported in Russian news media.
The Russian government has focused in particular on restricting reports of war casualties. In its most recent official announcement, in late March, Russia reported 1,351 military deaths, while the latest U.S. intelligence estimate, which was shared with Congress in recent days, put the number at 4,000 to 5,000.
But cracks in Moscow’s facade are starting to show. On Thursday, the Kremlin’s spokesperson acknowledged that Russia had suffered “significant losses.”
After the war started in February, Putin began erecting an internet firewall similar to China’s to block some Russian and Western news sites and social media networks. Russians can still visit Google and YouTube, but many Western sources of news are labeled “foreign agents.”
An authoritarian government does not have to maintain a perfect firewall to keep its public in a propaganda bubble. Many Russians get their news from state-controlled television and radio. And some Russian analysts argue that most citizens support the government for reasons beyond their news diet and want to believe the Kremlin’s lines.
American intelligence officials say that is why pushing information into Russia, and reaching the broadest population, is so difficult.
Nevertheless, American and European officials say that the attempt by outsiders to get facts about the war to Russians is important.
For now, Putin and the invasion remain popular in Russia, according to polls, though analysts caution that such measures of Russian attitudes are unreliable, mainly because many people fear making anti-war statements. The police have arrested thousands of protesters, and many people self-censor their remarks on Ukraine.
There are early signs that the efforts to break down the wall of propaganda may be working, said a senior Western intelligence official, who like other security officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified or sensitive government assessments.
And a U.S. data analytics company, FilterLabs.AI, which has been tracking Russian sentiment on internet message boards and other online forums, says it has measured growing anxiety among Russians about the draft and war casualties. Putin recently signed a decree ordering up about 134,500 conscripts, though the Defense Ministry said they would not go to Ukraine.
“We could be at a turning point in Russian sentiment toward the initial invasion of Ukraine, when Russia attempted to take over the whole country,” said Jonathan Teubner, CEO of FilterLabs.
Planting the seeds of doubt
The email to the 18-year-old Russian was, in some ways, subtle. It did not directly mention the invasion of Ukraine or allegations of war crimes against Russian soldiers.
Instead, it talked about the mistreatment of Russian soldiers by their own military and suggested the Russian government was lying to conscripts and, crucially, providing inadequate food and equipment to the country’s soldiers.
Over the last two weeks, a group of Ukrainian activists, government officials and think tanks, called the Information Strategies Council of Ukraine, has sent emails and social media messages to 15 million Russian men of draft age, between 18 and 27. It aimed other posts at older Russians, using historical references to prod them to discuss government-sanctioned news reports.
“The fundamental problem is that when you want to tackle the propaganda, you cannot just say what you are getting on TV is not true; it doesn’t work like that,” said Sophia Hnizdovska, an executive at the council. “We are trying to slowly, through our narratives, make people question the official sources.”
The most successful posts by the Ukrainian activists have built on this theme, focusing on the incompetence and corruption of Russian military leaders, members of the group say.
One image circulated by the group portrayed senior Russian military leaders, including Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, with his head filled with question marks and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the senior military leader, with his head filled with an image of a superyacht.
Russians tend to dismiss messages highlighting Russian war crimes as American propaganda, according to activists, and pictures of Russian casualties run the risk of inciting anger at Ukraine, rather than the Kremlin.
Teubner’s company is trying to measure the Ukrainians’ success — and in recent days has tracked what appears to be growing negative sentiment across Russia toward a draft. If the Ukrainians can sow enough doubt about the truthfulness of the Russian government, Hnizdovska said, more Russians will seek out information from Western-supported Russian-language news media.
Radio waves and real news
During the Cold War, the U.S. government, and the CIA specifically, helped found and fund independent media organizations with the mission to penetrate the Iron Curtain with fact-based news.
With the invasion of Ukraine, the organizations are once again operating with a sense of urgency as they push to get accurate information inside an authoritarian state.
The news organizations are using both old-school and 21st-century tactics, creating radio programs and complex digital information campaigns.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the main private, independent news organization in the region with U.S. government financing, is producing journalism on the war from reporters on the front lines in Ukraine and working quietly in Russia.
Commonly known as RFE/RL, the group has a Russian-language news site and a 24-hour Russian-language television network, Current Time, as well as websites aimed at regional audiences in a wide range of languages, including Tatar, Chechen and Belarusian.
Like some other news organizations and U.S.-based social media companies, its websites were blocked in Russia starting in late February. And it suspended its main operations in Russia last month.
RFE/RL opened offices in Lithuania and Latvia as new bases for its reporting on Russia. The group also has a medium-wave radio transmitter in Lithuania to send broadcasts into Russia that can be picked up on an AM frequency. Officials said they hoped to expand the signal’s strength.
The group uses Telegram, a chat app, to disseminate some of its reporting and to send out the web addresses of its new “mirror” sites.
A Washington-based sister organization that also gets funding from the U.S. government, the Open Technology Fund, sets up the mirror sites and constantly creates new ones to stay a step ahead of Russian government censors.
“In the context of new censorship, the mirror program has grown rapidly, and Russian censors are proving to be a very active adversary,” said Nat Kretchun, the organization’s senior vice president for programs. “Our partners are setting up a more automated system where once the Russian censors block them, new sites are set up.”
The technology group arranges for some of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s sites to be hosted by Tor, a digital communications network that helps shield ordinary internet users from surveillance. And it gives financing to companies and groups developing virtual private network apps, software known as VPNs, that help citizens get around internet firewalls. Owners of smart TVs in Russia can also download an app for Current Time.
And Current Time is among the RFE/RL networks and programs with channels on YouTube, which, unlike Facebook and Instagram, has not been blocked by Russian censors. RFE/RL said the number of video views on its YouTube channels more than tripled in the first three weeks of the war, to 237.6 million, from the three weeks prior.
“We’re seeing higher audience numbers for Russians inside the country and also for Russians outside,” said Jamie Fly, president and CEO of RFE/RL. “The challenge is: Can we maintain that over time? Will interest fade?”
In mid-March, Russian news outlets began running stories saying that Russian casualties in Ukraine were low, in contrast to much higher Western estimates. Those reports, according to an analysis by FilterLabs, came just as concern about the country’s war dead was starting to rise on local internet message boards — and as soldiers’ coffins began returning home.
Stories about Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine and Russian prisoners of war are among the most popular across RFE/RL platforms, said Patrick Boehler, the head of digital strategy for the news organization. The news agency’s reporters in Ukraine who learn the identities of Russians killed or taken prisoner pass that information to colleagues in Russia, who then try to find and interview the families.
The software developed by FilterLabs began tracking changes in public sentiment and shifts in how Russian news outlets talk about wartime casualties. Some skeptics question this kind of artificial-intelligence-driven sentiment analysis, and FilterLabs acknowledges that the technology has limits.
But the group says the broad trends it identifies are reliable and show that concern about the draft is increasing, as discussions on message boards appear to indicate that Russians are growing more worried that their children will be conscripted into the military to fight in Ukraine, Teubner said.
“The overall sentiment when talking about the draft is trending very negatively in the popular forums,” he said. “This shows us what is likely one of the greatest vulnerabilities for those trying to maintain support for the war over the long term.”
Valentina Saroyan sits in the basement of a school in Yahidne, near Chernihiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, April 12, 2022. Residents say more than 300 people were trapped for weeks by Russian occupiers in the basement of the school in Yahidne. (photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP)
Residents of Yahidne, a village 140 kilometers (87 miles) from Kyiv, told The Associated Press about being ordered into the basement at gunpoint after the Russians took control of the area around the northern city of Chernihiv in early March.
In one room, those who survived wrote the names of the 18 who didn’t.
“An old man died near me and then his wife died next,” Valentyna Saroyan, a weary survivor, recalled Tuesday as she toured the darkened basement. “Then a man died who was lying there, then a woman sitting next to me. She was a heavy woman, and it was very difficult for her.”
Village by village, town by town, Ukrainians in areas where Russians have withdrawn continue to unearth new horrors. More are feared.
The residents of Yahidne, which is on the outskirts of Chernihiv, said they were made to remain in the basement day and night except for the rare times when they they were allowed outside to cook on open fires or to use the toilet.
The health of the captives suffered.
“Here’s a chair, and that’s how we were sitting for a month,” Saroyan said, recalling her aching legs.
As people died one by one in the basement, neighbors were allowed from time to time to place the bodies in a mass grave in a nearby cemetery.
Each time, they passed through a doorway marked in dripping red paint with the plaintive words “Attention. Children.” The glare of a flashlight shows bright drawings on the walls.
The Russians could be cruel, surviving villages said.
Svitlana Baguta said a Russian soldier who was “either drunk or high” made her drink from a flask at gunpoint.
“He pointed the gun at the throat, put the flask and said, ‘Drink,’” Baguta said.
Julia Surypak said the soldiers allowed some people to make a short trip to their homes if they sang the Russian state anthem. “But they didn’t allow us to walk much,” she said.
The Russian forces left the village at the beginning of April, part of a regional withdrawal from northern Ukraine Russia’s military ordered in anticipation of after a large offensive in the east.
A message scrawled on a wall of the Yahidne school marked April 1 as “the last day” of their presence.
The soldiers left behind unexploded artillery shells, destroyed Russian vehicles and rubble.
Amazon Labor Union supporters held a rally outside of the company's DYX2 Staten Island location. (photo: Hiram Alejandro Duran/The City)
The fiercely anti-union company has doubled down on its anti-union efforts at a Staten Island warehouse, LDJ5, that is scheduled to begin a union election on April 25.
Organizers of the scrappy Amazon Labor Union say the company has clamped down on union activity in recent days at LDJ5, by repeatedly dismantling a pro-union banner in the break room, disciplining a leader of the unionization effort at LDJ5 for her organizing activity on the warehouse floor, and confiscating pro-union literature.
“Amazon’s tactics have gotten very, very intense,” said Madeline Wesley, an Amazon warehouse worker at LDJ5 and the treasurer of Amazon Labor Union who was written up on April 10 for “soliciting” her coworkers. “They’re getting away with lots of illegal anti-union activity.”
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Amazon has also continued to hold daily mandatory anti-union meetings and one-on-ones at LDJ5, and ALU organizers say, that the company has hired anti-union consultants, who typically work as independent contractors, as full-time employees with “blue badges” that allow them to blend in better with workers in the warehouse. Motherboard reviewed documentation that Amazon hired a veteran union buster, Rebecca Smith, to work at LDJ5. Smith is the author of Union Hypocrisy, has more than a decade of experience fighting union drives, and has ties to “ultra-conservative” political circles.
Last week, the National Labor Relations Board’s top attorney said she wanted to ban so-called ‘captive audience’ meetings saying they involve “an unlawful threat” that workers will be punished for refusing to listen to “such speech.”
At both warehouses, Amazon has deployed a wide variety of other anti-union propaganda, including fliers, mailers, phone calls, Instagram and Facebook ads, banners, and videos.
A victory for the union at LDJ5, which employs some 1,500 workers according to an internal roster obtained by Motherboard earlier this year, would be an important indicator of whether Amazon Labor Union’s success can be replicated elsewhere and spur a wave of unionization at Amazon warehouses across the country.
In late March, representatives of the company also repeatedly confiscated pro-union literature in the break room at LDJ5, according to Amazon Labor Union and videos uploaded to social media, where an Amazon representative confiscates union literature, but then promises to put it back when workers confront her saying “it’s illegal to remove anti-union literature,” and then removes it again shortly after.
In December, Amazon reached a national deal with the National Labor Relations Board, agreeing to email past and current warehouse workers in the United States—likely more than one million people—of their rights to organize within its facilities, the largest concession Amazon had made to date to organized labor.
The cases that led to the settlement involved workers in Staten Island and Chicago, where Amazon had banned workers from being in its break rooms and parking lots more than 15 minutes before or after a shift, impeding workers ability to organize.
Amazon’s settlement in December gave workers greater legal protection to organize in break rooms at Amazon warehouses, which became crucial in Amazon Labor Union’s victory in April, but ALU lawyers say that Amazon has refused to fully abide by this settlement at LDJ5.
“Amazon is violating the national settlement agreement,” said Seth Goldstein, an attorney who represents Amazon Labor Union workers and has filed more than 50 unfair labor practice complaints against Amazon on behalf of the union since May 2021. “These are blatant attacks on an agreement they were a party to. The core of the matter is Amazon agreed to something but they’re violating it because it suits their purposes for winning the election.”
At JFK8, Amazon did not interfere when union supporters hung up a free-standing yellow banner in the break room that said “Amazon Labor Union: VOTE YES!” in the lead up to the recent election. But when workers brought the banner into the break room at LDJ5 following Amazon Labor Union’s victory at JFK8, Amazon managers asked workers to take it down.
When workers refused, Amazon representatives removed the banner multiple times, at one point telling workers that the banner was only allowed to remain up if workers were holding it the entire time, and later saying that the banner could not be displayed in the break room at all.
“It’s the same banner that we were allowed to have at JFK8, but they didn’t think we’d win,” said Wesley. “First a manager and HR rep said we’re asking you to take it down, they didn’t say why, and we said ‘no we’re not going to take it down. It’s legally protected.’ Then they said it's a policy and we said’ then show us the policy,’ but [they refused.]’ Then they said organizers have to hold the banner, it can’t be freestanding. Then they said no banners allowed period. Their policy keeps changing and they still haven’t shown us the policy, but we’re worried that they’ll write organizers up for it, so now there are no banners.”
On April 10, two Amazon representatives called Wesley into a private meeting and presented her with a disciplinary write up for “soliciting” her coworkers during work hours at a workstation five days earlier, according to an audio recording obtained by Motherboard. According to an Amazon manager who is recorded on audio, Amazon punished Wesley for asking her coworkers to “vote yes” during work hours because “Amazon prohibits employees from soliciting during working time in working areas.”
“Soliciting involves engaging with a group of associates during the working time period,” the human resources representative said.
“So am I not allowed to talk to people during work?” Wesley said.
“You’re more than welcome to talk to anybody you’d like to,” the Amazon representative says. “It’s just when it’s regarding anything about the union.”
“So I’m not allowed to talk about the union when I’m working?” Wesley says.
“Specifically soliciting and engaging associates regarding that in the lanes while people are clocked in is prohibited, but you’re more than welcome to distribute any type of literature during non working periods,” the representative says.
“They wouldn’t give me any specific info on what I did,” Wesley told Motherboard of the incident. “I’m on the floor talking to people about union all the time. I have freedom of speech and other people are talking about the union all the time.”
In response to Amazon’s disciplinary action against Wesley, Goldstein filed unfair labor practice changes against Amazon for allegedly retaliating against a worker in order to discourage union activity. Goldstein also filed an unfair labor practice charge against Amazon for removing the “Vote Yes!” banner from the LDJ5 break room. Both charges will likely not be resolved for months, long after a result is determined in the upcoming union election.
The union election at LDJ5 will occur throughout the week of April 25. Votes will be tallied on May 2.
Peter Lyoya, right, father of Patrick Lyoya, closes his eyes as a tear runs down his face during the Justice for Patrick Lyoya march in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Saturday. The 26-year-old was killed during a traffic stop by a Grand Rapids police officer on April 4. (photo: Daniel Shular/The Grand Rapids)
Patrick Lyoya, 26, was killed outside a house in Grand Rapids, Mich. The white officer repeatedly ordered Lyoya to "let go" of his Taser, at one point demanding: "Drop the Taser!"
Citing a need for transparency, the city's new police chief, Eric Winstrom, released four videos, including critical footage of the shooting recorded by a passenger in Lyoya's car on that rainy morning.
"I view it as a tragedy. ... It was a progression of sadness for me," said Winstrom, a former high-ranking Chicago police commander who became Grand Rapids chief in March. The city of about 200,000 people is about 150 miles northwest of Detroit.
Video shows Lyoya running from the officer who stopped him for driving with a license plate that didn't belong to the vehicle. They struggled in front of several homes while Lyoya's passenger got out and watched.
Winstrom said the fight over the Taser lasted about 90 seconds. In the final moments, the officer was on top of Lyoya, kneeling on his back at times to subdue him.
"From my view of the video, Taser was deployed twice. Taser did not make contact," Winstrom told reporters. "And Mr. Lyoya was shot in the head. However, that's the only information that I have."
State police are investigating the shooting. Kent County's chief medical examiner, Dr. Stephen Cohle, said he completed the autopsy but toxicology tests haven't been finished.
The traffic stop was tense from the start. Video shows Lyoya, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting out of the car before the officer approached. He ordered Lyoya to get back in the vehicle but the man declined.
The officer asked him if he spoke English and demanded his driver's license. The foot chase began soon after, video shows.
Winstrom didn't identify the officer, a seven-year veteran who is on paid leave during the investigation.
"Me being from Chicago for the last 20 years, I've handled many police shootings myself, so I do have a lot of experience in this," the chief said. "I was hoping to never have to utilize that experience here."
Video was collected from Lyoya's passenger, the officer's body-worn camera, the officer's patrol car and a doorbell camera. Prosecutor Chris Becker, who will decide whether any charges are warranted, objected to the release but said Winstrom could act on his own.
Becker said the public shouldn't expect a quick decision.
"While the videos released today are an important piece of evidence, they are not all of the evidence," he said.
City Manager Mark Washington warned that the videos would lead to "expressions of shock, of anger and of pain." Some downtown businesses boarded up their storefronts, and concrete barricades surrounded police headquarters.
Lyoya had two young daughters and five siblings, said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who spoke to his family.
"He arrived in the United States as a refugee with his family fleeing violence. He had his whole life ahead of him," Whitmer, a Democrat, said.
More than 100 people marched to Grand Rapids City Hall before a City Commission meeting Tuesday night, chanting "Black lives matter" and "No justice, no peace."
Winstrom last week said he met Lyoya's father, Peter Lyoya, and that they both cried.
"I get it as a father. ... It's just heart-wrenching," the chief told WOOD-TV.
As in many U.S. cities, Grand Rapids police have been occasionally criticized over the use of force, particularly against Black people, who make up 18% of the population.
In November, the Michigan Supreme Court heard arguments in a lawsuit over the practice of photographing and fingerprinting people who were never charged with a crime. Grand Rapids said the policy changed in 2015.
A downtown street has been designated Breonna Taylor Way, named for the Black woman and Grand Rapids native who was killed by police in Louisville, Ky., during a botched drug raid in 2020.
ADDED:
Patrick Lyoya videos released by GRPD
Grand Rapids police video shows Patrick Lyoya being killed by officer
READ the latest stories following the Lyoya shooting: https://www.mlive.com/topic/patrick-l... GRAPHIC CONTENT: Patrick Lyoya, 26, was shot and killed by a Grand Rapids police officer during a traffic stop around 8:10 a.m. on Monday, April 4, 2022. Police video released by the Grand Rapids Police Department on April 13 shows the fatal shooting and the events leading up to it. Lyoya was shot on Nelson Avenue near Griggs Street on the Southeast Side of Grand Rapids. The police blurred portions of the video to preserve the privacy of the other individuals on the scene. (Video provided by the Grand Rapids Police Department) See the officer's body camera video: https://youtu.be/C3aejFdOaoY See a full video of the altercation: https://youtu.be/inuQELf75lo
A deforested area in the Brazilian Amazon. (photo: Mauro Pimentel/Getty)
That’s a record increase in deforestation for January through March since data collection began in 2015. The report, released Friday, came the same week that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that world leaders are currently not doing enough to reduce global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
“Brazil is an example of what the UN climate report is saying when referring to governments not taking the necessary actions,” Greenpeace Brazil forest campaigner Cristiane Mazzetti told CNN. “We have a government that goes deliberately against the necessary steps to limit climate change.”
Tropical forests like the Amazon are essential for combating the impacts of the climate crisis. A study published last month found that the world would be more than one degree hotter than it is now if all the world’s tropical forests were cut down. Further, another recent report found that protecting Indigenous lands in four forest countries including Brazil was essential for helping these countries meet their climate commitments.
However, since gaining office in 2019, right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has moved in the opposite direction. He has weakened protections for the environment and Indigenous rights, and deforestation in the country is now three times higher than it would need to be if the country wanted to meet its climate commitments under the Paris agreement.
The latest INPE findings follow two months of record deforestation in January and February, Reuters reported at the time. During the first three months of 2022, 363 square miles were cleared, according to CNN. That’s an area almost the size of Dallas, Texas and up from the 221 square miles cleared last year.
The new record is especially worrying because Brazil is currently in its rainy season, when logging is less common and farmers don’t clear land with fire, Al Jazeera reported.
“The fact that we are already at a record high and actually [seeing] numbers that are usually to be expected mid-year – when it’s drier and it’s actually easier to access the forest and do some damage – is indeed worrying,” Federal University of Minas Gerais environmental management professor Raoni Rajao told Al Jazeera.
Most of deforestation in Brazil is driven by agriculture, as the country is the world’s leading exporter of beef and soy. Scientists are concerned that, if the deforestation continues, the forest will reach a tipping point after which it loses the ability to generate its own rain and transforms into grassland.
“Even in the areas far away from the agricultural frontier, we’re starting to see the forest drying up and also become more prone to fires,” Rajao told Al Jazeera.
The new data indicates that the country may see record deforestation in 2022 overall, AFP reported.
The report comes as Indigenous people are in the middle of a 10-day protest in the capital of Brasilia against new legislation proposed by Bolsonaro that would open Indigenous lands to mining and farming, Al Jazeera reported further.
A pack of wolves in Yellowstone National Park are spotted from a wildlife tracking plane. (photo: Yellowstone National Park)
"This was the winter of my discontent," Yellowstone National Park senior wolf biologist Doug Smith says while driving over a washboarded dirt road near the park's northern border.
"The park line's right over here, and that's where a lot of the controversy occurred," he says, gesturing to the unmarked edge of the park just in front of us.
There's no wolf hunting inside the park itself, but when wolves set paw over the boundary into Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, they're fair game, at least during the hunting seasons that states are allowed to establish. This season, hunters killed 25 wolves — about 20% of the park's population. Smith says the wolf population varies throughout the year. Right now, he estimates the population is at something of a low point — likely numbering in the 80s.
Today, Smith's hoping to track a wolf that wears a radio collar. Over the course of his research team's 27 years studying the canines in Yellowstone, they've captured and collared more than 500 wolves — what Smith says is one of the largest wolf datasets in the world.
Hopping out of his car, he unfolds an antenna and begins to gesture it around, eyes on the distant hills. He thinks he hears a signal, but ... "I've radio-tracked so much in my life you get this thing called ghost beeps," he says. "You think you hear a beep and you don't."
Wolves were hunted to near-extinction as the country was colonized. The last pack of Yellowstone wolves was killed in 1926. They were reintroduced to the park in the mid-1990s, and along with mountain lions and grizzly bears, they've made a comeback.
"That's a really cool thing to say in this day and age when most environmental news is bad. Yellowstone is as good as it's ever been, and a big part of that is we've restored the ecosystem and we've done it with the toothy big carnivores," Smith says. "All of them."
Federal protections for wolves were dropped about a decade ago, and it became legal to hunt limited numbers of them. Now, saying they have come back too strong, Montana and Idaho changed hunting rules to reduce wolf populations in both states. Montana now allows night hunting, trap baiting and neck snares, among other measures. Idaho eliminated limits on how many wolves that hunters could kill. There, it's now legal to shoot them from ATVs and snowmobiles.
Suddenly, Smith gets a signal. Faint beeps grow louder.
"This wolf's around — how do ya like that?"
He says he's detecting a lone wolf. It's likely young, like most wolves in the park. And it's out of sight, but from the beeps he's getting, Smith says it's a mile, maybe a mile and a half in the distance.
As the number of wolf deaths climbed in December, Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly wrote Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte asking him to suspend the hunting season. His request fell on deaf ears. Nearly a year before, Gianforte himself had killed a collared wolf from the park (legally, although he was cited for having failed to complete a required trapper education course). In a press conference last year, Gianforte said trapping is an important part of managing species.
"It was a tremendous honor to be able to harvest a wolf here in Montana," he said.
Among measures passed last year meant to increase wolf mortality in the state, Montana dropped limits on how many of the canines can be killed in certain areas bordering Yellowstone. The total number killed in those areas shot up from four or fewer a year over the last decade to 19 this season.
After an outcry from conservation groups, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is now evaluating whether Endangered Species Act protections should be returned to wolves in the Northern Rockies.
Trappers and hunters
"There's a lot of panic among people when there doesn't need to be," says Brian Stoner. He's a trapper and an organizer of the Montana Trappers' Association annual fur auction, where I met him. The event was about an hour north of Yellowstone, and pelts from coyotes, foxes, bobcats and more were streaming through the doors and piling up on long, fold-out tables. In the hours to come, fur will fill the fairground hall.
"I wouldn't be surprised if we had a wolf or two that showed up by tomorrow," he said.
As he walked me through the tables, he said putting a value on each pelt is as much an art as a science. He used a bobcat pelt as an example.
"You'll notice it has some spots in here kind of in the center of the belly, but it gets a little weakened down here," he said.
For Stoner, wildlife is livelihood. It's also a lot more than that. He said that trappers have a unique relationship with animals that lots of outsiders don't understand and that they would not support rules that would cause extinction. He said what motivates him is the love of the animals.
"While I do go out there with the intent of harvesting these animals and I know that I'm killing them, I'm removing them from the population, I also know the dynamics of these animals," he said. "I know that they're able to breed, able to replenish. The last thing I want to do is trap the last of anything. I want my kids, my grandkids, I want future generations to be able to do this."
When it comes to wolves, he said harvest numbers this year are right on par with years past. At least, he says, if you are looking at the state as a whole.
"The only thing that is changing is the fact that that the wolves that are in the Yellowstone region, they got harvested more so than they have in the past," he said.
While this was a record-setting year for Yellowstone-area wolf deaths, the number of wolves killed in Montana overall was the lowest it's been since 2017, at 273 statewide.
Stoner said wolf populations bounce back quickly and the state sets guidelines based on science and provides backstops if the hunt gets out of hand. This season, Montana closed wolf hunting in the region around Yellowstone in February, about a month ahead of schedule.
So, concerns about too many Yellowstone are wolves being killed? "I think it's a lot of hoopla about nothing," he said.
Science in the park
Back near the park boundary, a tiny airplane about the size of a motorcycle with wings glides onto a small runway, while elk mill about nearby. That plane — a wildlife tracking aircraft called a Super Cub, meant to fly low and slow — is part of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, research in the park that's been going on for more than 25 years.
"That's the beauty of the Wolf Project, is that we've been getting these counts for over 25 years now, which is longer than I've been alive," says Maddy Jackson, a research technician.
The research focuses on what, when and where wolves are eating, as in bison, elk and deer. Most days, Jackson is on the "cluster crew" that hike out to areas where wolves are spending a lot of time to document the animals they're killing and scavenging. But today, she'll be in the plane, tracking the wolves from the air.
Jackson and the pilot fold themselves into the plane and take off. For the next three hours, they'll zigzag over the park, covering about 300 miles. They hope to see somewhere in the order of 60 wolves.
Yellowstone biologist Doug Smith, who leads the project, says wolf populations do recover fast, and this year's hunt doesn't mean the park's wolves are going extinct. But this many wolf deaths also disrupts the animals' deeper, social dynamics.
"This winter, what we experienced was catastrophic mortality," Smith says.
Catastrophic, he says, because wildlife research as long-running as the wolf project is rare but vital to understanding ecosystems. Yellowstone is a natural laboratory for studying wolves. He said there are lots of other studies that focus on wolf populations that are impacted by hunters. But here in Yellowstone, the population is unique in that it's both easy to observe and very nearly unimpacted by hunters and humans. Or at least, that had been the case.
"Our claim to fame with Wolf Research was we have the best data in the world in an unexploited-by-humans population," Smith says. "We don't have that now. And that's, I think, a shame and a tragedy."
In addition to tracking wolves by plane and with the cluster crew, Smith's team also has one other way of gathering data. He parks in a pullout and introduces me to Taylor Bland and Jeremy Sunder Raj, members of the ground crew. Like private eyes on a marathon stakeout, they're out from dawn to dusk, watching wolves from the road.
"We're all pretty exhausted, but we get to see pretty good behavior, so makes for good watching," Bland says.
The two take out spotting scopes and angle them toward a patch of trees in the distance. They scan the sage-dominated landscape for signs of movement and life. But no luck.
When they do get wolves in their sights, Bland, Sunder Raj and other members of the ground crew are busy interacting with tourists — who spend more than an estimated $30 million a year wolf-watching around Yellowstone — and also documenting what they see. They draw maps and record when the wolves are traveling, hunting, sleeping and more. Sunder Raj says all of the flights, the cluster crews and the documenting they're doing on the ground "has basically allowed us to learn basically more in the last 27 years about wolves than almost all of the other studies leading up to that."
The baseline data they gather can help answer questions about how to protect livestock from wolves and game animals that both draw tourists and provide food for local hunters.
"That's the flashpoint for wolves almost everywhere," Doug Smith says. "If we know kind of the base rates of what wolves do to elk, bison and deer, managers outside of national parks can use that to help make decisions about what they're doing."
Smith says the very thing that makes Yellowstone wolves unique makes them particularly vulnerable to hunting. Used to seeing humans lining the roads of the park, they don't exactly hide from people. He says one wolf this year was shot just 40 meters, or 130 feet, from the park line.
Smith said wolf hunting seasons like this one can't become annual events; hunting can help build tolerance for wolves. But he said they also need places like Yellowstone.
"So wolves can be wolves and nature can be nature."
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