FOCUS: David French | The Oddly Intense Anger Against Zelensky, Explained

 

25 December 22

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FOCUS: David French | The Oddly Intense Anger Against Zelensky, Explained
David French, The Atlantic
French writes: "Domestic animosity drives right-wing rage." 

Domestic animosity drives right-wing rage

“Ijust want to punch him.” That’s what Candace Owens told her 3.3 million Twitter followers in response to a video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky thanking Americans for their support in his nation’s existential struggle against Russian aggression. It’s an absurd, juvenile statement, but it was also par for the course on the new American right.

Zelensky’s visit to the United States triggered an astonishing outpouring of raw vitriol from some of the most prominent right-wing voices in the land. Donald Trump Jr. called Zelensky an “international welfare queen.” In a furious monologue on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson said that Zelensky—who wore fatigues similar to the ones he’s worn since the conflict started—“dressed like the manager of a strip club.” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh told his 1.2 million Twitter followers that Zelensky was a “grifting leech.”

The list goes on. Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson called Zelensky an “ungrateful piece of sh*t.” His boss, Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk, said Zelensky is “the perfect person for DC. Barely can speak English, an actor, and totally corrupt.”

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FOCUS: David Denby | The Making of Norman Mailer

 

 

25 December 22

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FOCUS: David Denby | The Making of Norman Mailer
David Denby, The New Yorker
Denby writes: "The young man went to war and became a novelist. But did he ever really come back?"  

The young man went to war and became a novelist. But did he ever really come back?

When Norman Mailer was inducted into the Army, in March, 1944, he was a freshly married twenty-one-year-old Harvard graduate, a slight young man of five feet eight inches and a hundred and thirty-five pounds. In the previous few years, he had published some stories and written a play and two novels (one of them published, in a typescript facsimile, as “A Transit to Narcissus,” in 1978). Even as a student, he thought of himself as a professional writer, and from the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, in December, 1941, he had wanted to write a big book about the war. He was sent for basic training to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where many of the men were from Pennsylvania, the South, and the Upper Midwest. Mailer was from middle-class Jewish Brooklyn; he had landed in the great working-class Gentile world, and was eager to observe. He canvassed the recruits about their sex lives, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. (He discovered that many of them did not believe in foreplay.) Mailer knew that tough Jews served in the war, including criminals, louts, and bitterly determined, hardworking men, but he was without physical skills. He had never worked a thresher, or manhandled heavy goods into a truck, or tinkered with Dad’s jalopy.

In early January, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur landed with an enormous invasion force on Luzon, the largest of the Philippine islands; Mailer, after waiting in a troopship, went ashore a few weeks later. He was thrown as a rifleman into the 112th Cavalry Regiment, out of Texas. The 112th had been in combat in the Pacific for more than a year, and many men in the unit had died. Mailer described those who remained as a little crazy, and physically messed up—some with open ulcers from jungle rot. The Texans were joined by men from other parts of the country, some of them bar fighters and casual anti-Semites (not by theory but by habit). “I didn’t open my mouth for six months in that outfit,” he later said.

“The nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn”—that was the one image of himself that Mailer said was “absolutely insupportable.” It was insupportable because, for a while, it was true. A picture of him in uniform from early in his service shows a young man with soft lips, large ears, a gentle gaze. He did indeed write his big war book, “The Naked and the Dead,” and it presents a fascinating paradox. A tough, even pessimistic work, filled with sordid sensuality—muck and detestable odors; bodily discomforts and mutilations; the tedium, exhilarations, and cruelties of an army fighting in the jungle—it may also have been a book that only a nice Jewish boy could write. A nice Jewish boy, that is, in flight from his background.

It requires some effort to recall the young Mailer across the intervening years of turmoil. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, as doggedly as an earlier puny American, Theodore Roosevelt, Mailer transformed himself into a barrel-chested macho—a man six times married, the father of eight children and an adopted son, and the author of more than forty books, some of them American classics (“The Armies of the Night,” from 1968, and the supremely abundant and sympathetic “The Executioner’s Song,” a “true life novel,” from 1979), some of them clogged and nearly unreadable. Attentive and sweet-natured much of the time—his letters to friends and even to strangers are generously supportive—he also brawled and headbutted at parties. He was decked, hammered, billy-clubbed; his eye was gouged. He believed that physical courage was necessary equipment for a great writer (Hemingway was the model), and that Jewish men in particular had to overcome all sorts of weaknesses. “In the first week / of their life / male jews / are crucified,” he wrote in a poem. His recklessness encompassed an abominable act: at the end of a drunken party, in 1960, he twice stabbed Adele Morales, his second wife and the mother of two of his children. “I let God down,” Mailer later told Betsy Mailer, one of his daughters with Adele.

For good and for ill, that was the Mailer the world knew for more than fifty years. When he died, in 2007, at the age of eighty-four, his reputation was at a low ebb. His temperament and preoccupations seemed artifacts of a bygone and benighted era. And not without reason. His reactionary sexual politics, expressed at length in the rapturously composed but morally preposterous polemic “The Prisoner of Sex,” published in Harper’s, in 1971, have been at the center of searing critiques for a half century.

Still, writers have a way of losing their labels. In the nineteen-forties, T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and George Orwell all wrote essays about Rudyard Kipling, retrieving what was aesthetically and emotionally satisfying from the bitter effusions of a rank imperialist and racist; some four decades later, Edward Said and other post-colonial critics and scholars continued the effort of defending the art embedded in the toxic mesh of Kipling’s attitudes. Mailer is a very different writer, but a similar kind of sorting out may be in the works, especially now that a major revival of interest in him has begun. The Library of America, which has brought out two volumes of Mailer’s writing from the sixties, is now reissuing “The Naked and the Dead,” in honor of Mailer’s hundredth birthday, on January 31st. The volume is edited by J. Michael Lennon, whose many-sided biography, “Norman Mailer: A Double Life” (2013), is by far the best that the author has received. Lennon has accompanied the novel’s text with a selection of the extraordinary letters that Mailer wrote from the battlefield to his first wife, Beatrice Silverman. Many additional projects devoted to Mailer are under way or have been proposed, including selections from his mid-fifties philosophical and erotic journal, a collection of his writings on democracy, a Showtime documentary, two TV series, and extended critical studies by Christopher Ricks and David Bromwich. In a new book, “Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer,” the British literary scholar and biographer Richard Bradford has produced an almost entirely negative portrait of a man whose life is “wonderfully grotesque,” and yet the book’s very existence attests to a more complicated reality. It would be naïve to suppose that the renewed attention on Mailer has nothing to do with the scandals attached to his name. It would also be naïve to pretend that he was not a great American writer.

Mailer’s father, Isaac (Barney) Mailer, was born near Vilnius, Lithuania, but moved with his family in 1900 to South Africa; he served in the British Army during the First World War. In America, he spoke with a punctilious English accent. In all, he was a strange bird—a mock Brit, a Jewish accountant, and a passionate gambler, frequently in debt. In 1922, Barney Mailer married Fanny Schneider. She had grown up in Long Branch, New Jersey, the daughter of a Lithuanian rabbi who never officially practiced in America. (According to a relative, the elder Schneider believed that “rabbis were shnorrers.”) At home in Crown Heights, just east of Prospect Park, Fanny, a loving, capable woman, raised Norman and his sister, Barbara, while managing a home-oil-delivery business by telephone. The Jewish-folkloric combination of a weak father and a strong mother evidently benefitted Fanny’s son, who drew power from the devotion of his parents, aunts, and uncles throughout his seventy-year writing career.

As a child, Norman was quiet and obedient, too preoccupied with his studies to spend much time among the neighborhood bonditts, with their pranks and their passion for stickball. On the way to school (Boys High, in Bedford-Stuyvesant), he kept his head down, avoiding fights with the local Italian and Irish street gangs, and with the local Jewish toughs as well. He built model airplanes, some of them extremely impressive, and spent his summers, with Barbara, in a resort hotel in Long Branch, run by one of his aunts. In a spare room, he would write fiction.

In September, 1939, Mailer showed up at Harvard in an outfit of orange-striped trousers, a gold jacket, and saddle shoes. He was sixteen, and found himself as ignorant about ruling-class undergraduates and the social rituals of the college as he was, five years later, about the habits of working-class Americans. The clothes were soon discarded, though some of his regular laundry was sent home, washed by the family’s Black maid, and mailed back. In his first year on campus, he ate dinner with other Jewish boys at the Harvard Union and began to feel his way around. Until the end of his sophomore year, he lived almost entirely within the protected boundaries of the American Jewish middle class.

At the time, Latin was a prerequisite for English majors at Harvard; Mailer had never studied it, so he became an engineering major, learning much that would serve him well when he reconstructed the liftoff of the Saturn V rocket in “Of a Fire on the Moon” (1970), his impassioned report on the Apollo 11 moon landing. His main occupation at school was reading, particularly the American realists he discovered as a freshman—James T. Farrell (the Studs Lonigan trilogy), John Dos Passos (the U.S.A. trilogy), John Steinbeck (“The Grapes of Wrath”). Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe came afterward, and Hemingway served as a (distant) spiritual mentor. Hemingway’s hunting, fishing, and boxing, his war exploits, his courageous and soulful physicality—boastful yet wounded—bore little resemblance to the habits of Crown Heights Jews. Mailer fell in love.

His own problem as a writer, he believed, was a lack of experience. Escaping from Harvard’s rich preppies and ambitious Jews, he rode the subway around Boston, taking notes on working-class behavior, clothes, and accents. In the summer after his sophomore year, he left his hotel room on the Jersey shore with just a few dollars in his pocket and hitchhiked his way down to North Carolina, sleeping outdoors at night. Voluntarily, and for only two weeks, he became that familiar Depression-era figure, a hobo. When he returned home, Fanny made him take off his clothes before coming inside.

His lack of sexual experience was particularly mortifying. “You bore a standard of shame,” he later said of himself and his friends. He at least lost his physical inhibitions. He played football in front of Dunster House, and loved the bone-jarring contact. At a Boston Symphony concert during his junior year, he met Beatrice (Bea) Silverman, a lively music major attending Boston University. She was argumentative, a passionate lefty, and a proto-feminist; she was also profane and, in the appreciative slang of the day, “earthy.” They carried on in the mattressed trunk of a Chevy given to Mailer by his uncle, and, at Dunster, they became known for their lovemaking in Mailer’s dorm room. Bea would talk dirty in front of his friends; they were both showing off. They got married in secret, in January, 1944. His draft notice arrived a week later.

What Mailer did in the war was not heroic. At first, working at headquarters on Luzon, he typed reports, laid wire, built a shower for officers. Humiliated and bored, he volunteered for a reconnaissance squad. He went on twenty-five patrols, many of them fifteen miles long, and he finally saw some combat: nothing much, as he admitted, but he knew what it was like to climb up a damp, rocky hill in the heat while burdened with a rifle, ammunition, grenades, two canteens, a steel helmet—perhaps forty pounds in all. His real mission was to see the worst and make an account of it. He wrote long letters to Bea (who had joined the Waves), some of which were detailed and harrowing. He was not just creating the book but creating himself as a man. In February, 1945, he entered a Japanese-held town that the Americans had overwhelmed with artillery and tanks. A letter to Bea chronicled what he saw:

Right before us was a destroyed Japanese armored half-track and a tank. The vehicles were still smoldering, and the driver of the half-track had half fallen out, his head which was crushed from one ear to the jaw lay reclining on the running board, and the pitiful remaining leg thrust tensely through the windshield. The other leg lay near his head on the ground, and a little smoke was still arising from his chest. Another Japanese lay on his back a short distance away with a great hole in his intestines which bunched out in a thick white cluster like a coiled white garden hose. . . .

After a half hour or so we descended to the road, and mounted the Jeep again. As we drove along the road the destruction was complete. Fragments of the corrugated steel from the warehouses had landed everywhere, and the wreckage formed almost a pattern on the road. Everything stunk, and everything, the road, the wreckage, the mutilated vehicles had become the two colors of conflagration—the rust red and the black. The whole vista was of destroyed earth and materiel—that battlefield looked like a hybrid between a junk-yard and a charnel house; it was perhaps the ugliest most dejecting sight I have ever seen. You wished acutely for rain, as the quick hand-maiden to time.

Some of the writing wound up in “The Naked and the Dead.” The impressions are fresh: war meant the destruction of the body’s unity, the collapse of physical structure, color, intactness.

After the Japanese surrendered, in August, 1945, Mailer became part of the American force occupying the home islands. He worked mainly as an Army cook, which he enjoyed. He attained the rank of sergeant, and sent his family a picture of himself in uniform looking much older than in the earlier photograph—now darkly handsome, with square shoulders and a full head of hair in the style of the actor John Garfield. Soon after that picture was taken, though, he got into a humiliating quarrel with a superior and turned in his stripes. He left the Army in 1946 as a private, after a little more than two years of service. He and Bea settled in Brooklyn and Provincetown. He wrote “The Naked and the Dead” at a rate of five thousand words a week, finishing in about fifteen months, including new and rewritten sections. The book received rave reviews and was an overnight best-seller, remaining on the Times list for more than a year. The Brooklyn Jewish boy was no longer abashed, no longer inadequate, and certainly no longer quiet.

In 1960, looking back on the book, Mailer described his state of mind in a letter to his friend Diana Trilling, the literary critic. “There is no meaning but the present,” he wrote. “So of course I could do The Naked and the Dead. I had no past to protect, no habits to hold on to, no style to defend. My infirmity is that I had no emotional memory.” This is an attempt at mythmaking. He sounds as if he were creating himself as he went along, though what he actually meant by “no emotional memory” was no memory he was proud of. Henry Roth, in “Call It Sleep” (1934), and Alfred Kazin, in “A Walker in the City” (1951), had done a great deal with the furtive behavior of a Jewish boy on the streets, but Mailer saw his childhood as something not to explore but to transcend. He drew heavily on the American realists, especially Dos Passos, in constructing his own version of wartime naturalism, piling up endless physical detail and moments of emotional suffering.

“The Naked and the Dead” is set on the fictional island of Anopopei, an irregular kidney-shaped blob in the Pacific with trackless vegetation and withering wet heat—and also thousands of Japanese defenders, though they hardly figure in the novel. Mailer never tells us how the Anopopei campaign fits into the Americans’ strategy. The absence is intentional: strategy is left to officers, who, in Mailer’s estimate, are mainly self-important stiffs. What matters most in the book is the day-to-day lives of fourteen soldiers in a reconnaissance platoon, who find themselves trapped between the obsessions of two pathological egotists—the island commander, General Edward Cummings, a MacArthur-like military intellectual who thinks that men can be controlled only through fear (“the natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety,” he says), and, at the platoon level, Staff Sergeant Sam Croft, a nerveless warrior who “could not have said . . . where his hands ended and the machine gun began.” For Croft, killing seems a natural expression of his being. In a limited way, he’s intensely admirable. Writing to Bea, Mailer described his creation of Croft as “an archetype of all the dark, bitter, inarticulate, capable and brooding men that America spawns.” Capability meant a great deal to the young writer.

Mailer wrote a terrifying combat scene (armies firing across a river at night), but much of the novel chronicles the routine work of men at war: unloading supplies, building a road, cleaning weapons, “harsh eventless days” followed by such exertions as pulling 37-mm. anti-tank guns down a jungle path in darkness. (Seen in the light of a flare, “the guns had a slender articulated beauty like an insect reared back on its wire haunches.”) In the central action of the novel, General Cummings, eager to show off his tactical prowess, sends the platoon on a recon mission that turns out to be foolish, even superfluous, and Croft, ready to test himself, willingly carries it out, sacrificing men en route. He tries to take the platoon over the island’s big mountain, Anaka—which he thinks of as his mountain, as Ahab thinks of the whale. But the labor of ascending Anaka is far from exalting, and the men curse it the whole way. In the end, Croft’s mountain worship goes nowhere. Somewhere near the peak, he stumbles into a hornets’ nest, and the enraged insects cause the men to abandon their packs and rifles and scatter down the slope like children. Cummings’s regular infantry, under the command of a mediocre officer (Cummings is away), wipes out the remaining Japanese garrison.

When Mailer worked on the book, right after the war, jubilation was a large part of the national mood—a cheerfully militant atmosphere of gallant warriors and sleeves-rolled-up citizens fighting Fascism in “the good war.” During the war and just after, Hollywood movies portrayed the democratic unit—an ethnically mixed platoon or bomber crew—as a vessel of a great national cause. But Mailer writes without the slightest elation over American victory and Japanese defeat, and his platoon is less a common cause than a group of ornery, banged-up soldiers hoping to survive. Unlike Kipling, who overcame a miserable, bullied childhood in part by identifying with the strong (especially those of the British Empire), Mailer expressed contempt for powerful men bereft of human understanding. He was attracted to violence as an exploration of personal will, while despising authority in any institutional form.

The over-all emotion of the novel is one of futility. Accident, not strategy, rules. Cummings and Croft could be seen as incipient postwar American Fascists, highbrow and lowbrow, but both of them wind up stymied. The book asks, What is the point of endless effort and repetition? Is persistence life’s only meaning? The postwar celebratory mood was shadowed by disillusionment and absurdism. As Mailer was bringing out “The Naked and the Dead,” in 1948, Samuel Beckett was in Paris writing “Waiting for Godot.” As a war novel, Mailer’s book looks back to Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895), with its confused, even incoherent battle scenes—all smoke and noise—and forward to Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (1961), in which the war and Army bureaucracy are rendered as a malign joke, dissolving any possible purpose into contradiction.

Mailer wrote “The Naked and the Dead” in an omniscient floating third person, moving from the mind of one man to that of another. The coarseness of the soldiers’ thoughts and speech shocked some readers in 1948, though now it seems to us the way men in combat have always talked. As we discover in lengthy, bristling flashbacks, many of the men had been knocking around in Depression America, working on farms, in stores, in ordinary jobs, or not working much at all. Vaguely rebellious yet defeated, they are callous and cynical about women, and routinely contemptuous of “Yids” and “Izzies.” These hard-luck guys have little purpose in their lives. Lieutenant Hearn, a Harvard graduate like Mailer, appears, at first, to be the hero of the novel, a liberal in revolt against his wealthy family. But Hearn is unfocussed and diffident, pulled by his own narcissism into confrontations with General Cummings that will destroy him. This war book has some courageous fighters and some generous acts, but it has neither heroes nor innocents. Unlike “the youth” in “The Red Badge of Courage,” no one has any illusions to lose.

For all Mailer’s hard knowledge of failure, his prose is little like that of his hero, Hemingway. It is not spare, stoic, and flowingly lyrical (from “A Farewell to Arms”: “Late in the afternoon the rain stopped and from out number two post I saw the bare wet autumn country with clouds over the tops of the hills and the straw screening over the roads wet and dripping”) but abrupt, obsessional, and grimly material. Mailer, describing men attempting to carry a wounded buddy on a stretcher back to safety, unleashes the enduring achievement of the book, his portrayal of the male body at the outer edge of fatigue:

Through the afternoon the litter-bearers continued on their march. About two o’clock it began to rain, and the ground quickly became muddy. The rain at first was a relief; they welcomed it on their blazing flesh, wriggled their toes in the slosh that permeated their boots. The wetness of their clothing was pleasurable. They enjoyed being cold for a few minutes. But as the rain continued the ground became too soft, and their uniforms cleaved uncomfortably to their bodies. Their feet began to slip in the mud, their shoes became weighted with muck and stuck in the ground with each step. They were too fagged to notice the difference immediately, their bodies had quickly resumed the stupor of the march, but by half an hour they had slowed down almost to a halt. Their legs had lost almost all puissance; for minutes they would stand virtually in place, unable to co-ordinate their thighs and feet to move forward. . . . The sun came out again, inflamed the wet kunai grass and dried the earth whose moisture rose in sluggish clouds of mist. The men gasped, took deep useless breaths of the leaden wet air, and shambled forward grunting and sobbing, their arms slowly and inevitably bending toward the ground.

On a bad day, a soldier will know every wretchedness of skin, lungs, arms, legs, bowels, kidneys. “The Naked and the Dead” is repetitive but at times very moving; the men carrying the stretcher reach a state, beyond exhaustion, in which “they were reduced to the lowest common denominator of their existence,” and meet it with acceptance. As Mailer’s letters to Bea reveal, he was shocked by the corrupted materiality of jungle war: the spilling corpses, the breakdown of physical integrity. But his writing about the living male body amounts to a full-throated humanist response: the body under stress is heroic, living in its wholeness, with consciousness remaining intact, even when vibrating with pain.

At the same time, “The Naked and the Dead” is surprisingly delicate in feeling. The rare moments of solidarity among the men give way to scraped emotions and anger, followed by distance and bitter hurt. The two Jews in the platoon, Roth and Goldstein, struggle especially hard for dignity—an obvious point of concern for Mailer, who had his own anxieties to resolve. Roth has been to City College in New York (the home of New York Jews in the thirties); he’s married, but he’s not getting anywhere. An irritable guy, he’s snobby, morose, and too weak to survive—clearly Mailer’s disapproving version of himself. Mailer endowed Goldstein with greater physical and moral strength. Like some earlier Jewish writers, Mailer saw virtue in a life of physical activity and advanced moral adventure: what Max Nordau, at the Zionist Congress in 1898, called Muskeljudentum, or “muscular Judaism”—a disavowal of endless study and effete intellection. Goldstein, along with a very serious Christian, attempts to carry the wounded soldier out of the jungle. As a boy, Goldstein heard his grandfather talk of Jewish suffering in the back of the family’s candy store in Brooklyn. It meant nothing to him at the time, but when he’s bearing the stretcher the words of the medieval sage Judah Halevi jump into his head: “Israel is the heart of all nations.” Goldstein’s consciousness as a Jew keeps him from letting go, for, if he fails, the men will think badly not just of him but of all Jews. In the character of Goldstein, Mailer’s fear that he was not tough enough for the Army ends in a portrait of formidable endurance.

The enormous success of “The Naked and the Dead” left Mailer uneasy. He had no idea how he was going to live up to it. Seemingly on top of the world at twenty-five, he feared many things. In his novel, the Harvard-educated liberal allows himself to be trapped by power. Mailer, in his own eyes, needed to escape the traps not only of his soft middle-class Jewish background but also of postwar America—the desire for “security,” the endless consumerism, and what he took to be the country’s humiliating spiritual mediocrity. It’s as if he were still in the jungle, pulling artillery through the night. He had made himself into a novelist in the Pacific, and now he brought the war home, fighting on two fronts—against what he disliked in himself and against those menaces of the nineteen-fifties, “conformity” and “adjustment.” He acted out his rebellion in a continual performance with phallus, fists, booze, and sustained ass-in-chair writing sessions—a pressure at times noble, at times foolish, and certainly rough on other people as well as on himself. He became an egotist of a peculiarly self-afflicting sort, both calculating and spontaneous, provoking many blows, all of them deserved, all of them welcomed. For the author of “The Naked and the Dead,” the truce never arrived.

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FOCUS: How Russian Soldiers Ran a 'Cleansing' Operation in Bucha

 

 

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FOCUS: How Russian Soldiers Ran a 'Cleansing' Operation in Bucha
Erika Kinetz, Associated Press
Kinetz writes: "The first man arrived at 7:27 a.m. Russian soldiers covered his head and marched him up the driveway toward a nondescript office building."

The first man arrived at 7:27 a.m. Russian soldiers covered his head and marched him up the driveway toward a nondescript office building.

Two minutes later, a pleading, gagged voice pierced the morning stillness. Then the merciless reply: “Talk! Talk, f—ing mother-f—er!”

The women and children came later, gripping hastily packed bags, their pet dogs in tow.

It was a cold, gray morning, March 4 in Bucha, Ukraine. Crows cawed. By nightfall, at least nine men would walk to their deaths at 144 Yablunska street, a building complex that Russians turned into a headquarters and the nerve center of violence that would shock the world.

Later, when all the bodies were found strewn along the streets and packed in hasty graves, it would be easy to think the carnage was random. Residents asking how this happened would be told to make their peace, because some questions just don’t have answers.

Yet there was a method to the violence.

What happened that day in Bucha was what Russian soldiers on intercepted phone conversations called “zachistka” — cleansing. The Russians hunted people on lists prepared by their intelligence services and went door to door to identify potential threats. Those who didn’t pass this filtration, including volunteer fighters and civilians suspected of assisting Ukrainian troops, were tortured and executed, surveillance video, audio intercepts and interviews show.

The Associated Press and the PBS series "Frontline" obtained surveillance camera footage from Bucha that shows, for the first time, what a cleansing operation in Ukraine looks like. This was organized brutality that would be repeated at scale in Russian-occupied territories across Ukraine — a strategy to neutralize resistance and terrorize locals into submission that Russian troops have used in past conflicts, notably Chechnya.

Ukrainian prosecutors now say those responsible for the violence at 144 Yablunska were soldiers from the 76th Guards Airborne Assault Division. They are pursuing the commander, Maj. Gen. Sergei Chubarykin, and his boss, Col. Gen. Alexander Chaiko — a man known for his brutality as leader of Russia’s troops in Syria — for the crime of aggression for waging an illegal war.

Police ended up recovering nearly 40 bodies along Yablunska street alone. Prosecutors have identified 12 around 144 Yablunska; AP reporters documented a 13th body in the stairwell of one of the buildings in the complex, in photos and videos taken on April 3.

Taras Semkiv, Ukraine’s lead prosecutor for the 144 Yablunska street case, told the AP and “Frontline” that it’s unusual to see war crimes play out on video and that the CCTV footage and eyewitness accounts from March 4 are key elements for the prosecution.

“The results of the criminal evidence we’ve gathered so far reveal that it wasn’t just isolated incidents of military personnel making a mistake but a systematic policy targeting the Ukrainian people," Semkiv said.

The Kremlin didn't respond to detailed questions sent by the AP.

___

This story is part of an AP/FRONTLINE investigation that includes the War Crimes Watch Ukraine interactive experience and the documentary “ Putin’s Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes,” on PBS. The AP and “Frontline” reviewed hundreds of hours of video from surveillance cameras in Bucha and vetted audio recordings of phone calls by Russian soldiers.

Together with SITU Research, a New York-based visual investigations firm, we reconstructed events using a 3D model of Bucha, drawn from data from drones flown over Bucha this spring. AP reporters verified the locations of the security cameras, and The Dossier Center, a London-based investigative group funded by Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky, verified the identity of soldiers whose phone calls were intercepted by the Ukrainian government by cross-referencing Russian phone numbers, social media accounts, public reporting and information in leaked Russian databases.

___

THE FALL OF BUCHA

Around lunchtime on March 3, three armored Russian vehicles appeared just beyond the quarry at the western edge of Bucha. Maksym Stakhov, a veteran of the 2014 war against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, spotted them. He jumped in his car and raced around town, hollering: “Hide! Run away! The Russians are coming!”

Stakhov and a few dozen other volunteers, along with a handful of soldiers, set up three checkpoints to inspect people’s documents and help with evacuations along Yablunska street, a strategic road that roughly divides Bucha from neighboring Irpin. Most of the volunteers had never handled weapons before, Stakhov and another fighter told the AP, and they scrounged what few guns they could.

Civilians headed to the well-fortified basement of an office building in an industrial complex at 144 Yablunska street for shelter, unaware that what they believed was a safe haven would soon become a prison.

At 12:45 p.m., two Ukrainian soldiers took up a post in the driveway of No. 144 and began directing traffic. They were soon joined by around 20 more men, who made a brief last stand, their guns and grenade launchers aimed to the west. One soldier lay on his stomach in the road and fired off rounds on his rifle.

Analysts from the Royal United Services Institute and the Centre for Information Resilience reviewed CCTV footage from the AP and confirmed that the camouflage and markings of their uniforms indicate they were Ukrainian.

Meanwhile, a seemingly endless convoy of Russian firepower was winding into town along the railroad tracks. The volunteers’ radios crackled with a warning: Russian forces are moving in with heavy weapons. Evacuate.

“We had almost no weapons. It made no sense to fight them,” Stakhov said. “Guys were crying. We didn’t want to retreat.”

They fled across the fields to a mall in Irpin, which Ukraine still controlled.

Shortly before 1 p.m., most of the Ukrainian soldiers at 144 Yablunska street clambered into a black van and sped off to the east. Four stragglers fired off a few final rounds. By 12:57 p.m., the Ukrainians were gone.

To the west, Yablunska was burning. Half an hour after the Ukrainians disappeared, the first detachment of Russian soldiers emerged from smoke and flames and crept on foot down the street.

In the chaos of the Russian advance, eight Ukrainian checkpoint volunteers got separated from the others. One, a taxi driver named Ivan Skyba, said in court papers that he had volunteered to help Ukraine’s territorial defense but was not officially part of the military. All the men had was body armor, walkie-talkies, a Kalashnikov rifle and a hand grenade.

The volunteers ducked into a pale brick house at 31 Yablunska street and listened in silence to the searing crack of nearby rifles and endless rumble of Russian tanks. At 5:49 p.m., Andrii Dvornikov, another checkpoint volunteer, got a message from a Ukrainian fighter who had made it from Bucha to Irpin. He knew he was in trouble.

“Do you have food?” his friend asked.

“I can’t think about food now,” Dvornikov messaged back. “We want to get to Irpin.”

“Don’t go out at all!” his friend warned.

Around 9 p.m., Russian troops and military vehicles groaned down the long driveway of No. 144 under flurries of snow and sleety rain. By the morning of March 4, the Russians controlled Yablunska.

The cleansing was about to begin.

MARCH 4: CLEANSING

As more tanks rolled in, Russian soldiers shook hands, chatted and laughed with one another. Henry Schlottman, a former U.S. military intelligence analyst who reviewed surveillance footage from the AP, traced visible symbols and markings on Russian military vehicles and a munitions crate AP reporters found at 144 Yablunska to the 76th Guards Airborne Assault Division and related units.

The paratroopers swept up and down Yablunska, checking people’s documents, examining their phones and interrogating them, according to interviews with local residents. In some cases, they already had the names of the people they wanted to find.

Around 10 a.m., Dvornikov called his wife, Yulia Truba, from the house on Yablunska. He told her to delete all evidence of their communications.

Not long after, Russian soldiers broke down the door of 31 Yablunska and hauled Dvornikov, Skyba, six other volunteers and the owner of the house out to the yard. They made them take off their shoes, called them Banderivtsi — implying they were Nazis — and accused them of acting as spotters for the Ukrainian military.

Then two Russian soldiers led the men at gunpoint down the wet, icy road to 144 Yablunska, cursing at them as they shuffled along in their stockinged feet.

It was 11:08 a.m.

Soldiers forced them to their knees behind a Russian military vehicle in the driveway of the complex and kicked them. Then Skyba saw them lift up the man next to him and shoot him in the head.

One of the volunteers, fearing for his life, confessed they’d been manning a checkpoint, Skyba said. The young man, nicknamed "The Saint,” survived the carnage at Yablunska street. But Ukrainians later hunted him down and investigated him for treason, according to documents and photographs seen by the AP and “Frontline.”

Over the next few hours, soldiers delivered more and more people to 144 Yablunska. They had been repeatedly told — by Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others — that they would be welcomed by their Ukrainian brothers and sisters as liberators and anyone who resisted was likely a fascist, an insurgent, not a real civilian.

Shortly before noon, four men were marched in. Then a lone man, hands behind his back. Two women and a man, with a red suitcase and a small dog in tow. A cluster of four civilians. Another pair, then a man, trailed by a woman and a black dog and then a cluster of five people and four dogs.

Then, at 12:48 p.m., soldiers led a man with a sack over his head away by the elbows. One minute later, an elderly woman hobbled in on her cane.

One of the people picked up that morning was 20-year-old Dmytro Chaplyhin, a baby-faced store clerk everyone called Dima. Soldiers went to his home, just off Yablunska, and found images of Russian tanks on his phone. They accused him of helping the Ukrainian military.

As the soldiers took Dima away, his grandmother, Natalia Vlasenko, fell to her knees.

“God, I begged them not to touch him,” she said. “He pointed a rifle at me and said, ‘If you won’t give him up the easy way, then we’ll do it the hard way.’”

“Grandma, don’t worry!” Dima called as he left with the soldiers and headed for 144 Yablunska street. “I will come back!”

It was the last time she saw him alive.

Meanwhile, Russian soldiers were breaking into people’s homes, forcing locks and busting through high fences with their tanks, CCTV footage shows. They told locals they were looking for weapons. Residents said the soldiers also stole tools, electronics gear, food and liquor.

They systematically took out every CCTV camera they found. Screen after screen cut to black.

Out front of their makeshift headquarters, Russian soldiers sat on top of their tank, sharing a bottle of Coca-Cola and playing with a pistol. Behind them, the crowd of civilians at No. 144 had thickened.

Barking dogs ran wild. Incongruously, some soldiers handed out tinned meat and matches and told people they were being freed from Nazi oppression, while others conducted public executions.

When the Russians marched Iryna Volynets to 144 Yablunska, she recognized one of the men lined up in the driveway as her old school friend Andrii Verbovyi. He was slumped over on his side in a fetal position, an alarmingly long trail of blood running from his body, she said.

Volynets knew her friend was still alive because she could see him trembling. They locked eyes. She thought she should cover him with a cloth that lay nearby, but her courage failed her.

Shaken, Volynets didn’t immediately notice that her own son, Slava, was also kneeling in the line of doomed men. She finally recognized him by his jacket and pants. He’d taken a blow to the ribs and was breathing heavily.

Soldiers began to lead the kneeling men into the office building two at a time, Volynets said. She was panicked, desperate to negotiate Slava’s release. The Russians took a young man over to take a close look at Slava.

“Is it him?” they asked.

“No, not him,” the young man answered.

Slava got his boots back and lived.

Russians let most of the civilians go that day, first the women, then the men. But the volunteers were not released.

Skyba was hit in the face so hard it knocked his teeth out. His eyebrow split open, and blood gushed down his face.

Russians tied his hands with tape behind his back, put a bucket over his head and kneeled him against a wall inside the office complex. They piled bricks on his back until he fell over, then hauled him up and beat his head through the bucket until he lost consciousness.

“What should we do with them?” Skyba heard a Russian say. “Kill them,” another answered. “But take them away first so they’re not laying around here.”

Russian soldiers led Sykba and other volunteers around the corner of the office building to a small courtyard where there was already one dead body. Then two soldiers started shooting.

Skyba felt something pierce his side, and he hit the ground. He had taken a bullet clean through his abdomen, a photograph shows. He pretended to be dead, terrified the Russians would see his exhalations cloud the cold air.

“I was waiting for the darkness,” he said. “Terrible ... I cannot explain ... . Just terrible.”

Once it was silent, Skyba worked his wrists out of the tape that bound them, crawled through the corpses of his comrades from the checkpoint and stole boots from the body of the only man who still had them on. He ran to a neighboring house and curled up on the sofa, trying to get warm.

Then he heard voices. Russians.

“Is anybody here in the house?” a man called. Skyba pretended to be the owner.

Believing him to be an injured civilian, the soldiers took him back to 144 Yablunska, this time for medical treatment, Skyba said. They led him to the basement, where more than 100 people were being held.

For the next three days, Skyba huddled there, telling no one about his bullet wound. The only toilet was broken. Children cried. Adults prayed. The smell of human waste was overpowering.

On March 7, Skyba and the others were allowed to leave the basement. Everyone else who had been captured with him, except for "The Saint,” was dead. He retrieved his eyeglasses, which had fallen near the body of one of the checkpoint volunteers. Then he walked out of 144 Yablunska street.

‘I THINK I'M GOING CRAZY'

As their advance to Kyiv stalled and losses mounted, Russian troops continued to cleanse the streets of Bucha and surrounding towns with rising levels of sometimes drunken violence.

On March 14, a soldier nicknamed Lyonya called his mother from a cell tower near Bucha.

“There are civilians on the streets with their brains out,” he said. His mother wanted to know who had shot them.

“Our people,” Lyonya said.

“Maybe they were just peaceful civilians,” his mother said.

“Mom, there is fighting going on. And suddenly he jumps out! You understand? What if he’s got a grenade launcher?” Lyonya said.

One time, Lyonya described, they stopped a young boy and checked the Telegram account on his phone. The app had information about the location and logistics of the Russians.

“He was shot on the spot,” Lyonya told his mom.

On March 17 and 18, a Russian soldier named Ivan called his mother from Bucha. She’d forgotten which military unit he belonged to and he reminded her: 74268 — the 234th Guards Airborne Assault Regiment, which is part of the 76th Guards Airborne Assault Division.

Ivan said that Russians “shoot everyone, who gives a f— who it might be: a child, a woman, an old lady, an old man. Anyone who has weapons gets killed. Absolutely everyone.”

He explained that his unit goes out for “cleansing” on its tanks, seizing weapons, strip-searching people and examining their phones “to see if there is information or who is against us.”

“If we have to — we will kill,” he said.

On March 21, a soldier named Maksym called his wife from outside Kyiv. He told her he’d been drinking — everyone was drinking — because life here without liquor was too much to bear.

“How will you protect yourself if you are tipsy?” his wife worried.

“Totally normal," he replied. "It’s easier to shoot civilians.”

He was scared, shocked by what he’d seen and very close to the front line.

“You know how many civilians I killed here? Those men leaked information,” he said.

“Don’t say anything!” his wife warned.

“Hide the weapons from me! I think I’m going crazy. I’ve already killed so many civilians.”

Later, she asked: “Why the f— did you go there?”

A SYMBOL OF ACCOUNTABILITY

What happened at 144 Yablunska is case No. 1 for the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general.

Ukraine is scrambling to build a system that can handle tens of thousands of complex war crimes investigations. There are more than 3,500 investigations in Bucha alone, and things have fallen through the cracks. In the case files for 144 Yablunska two dates were off, the AP found. Prosecutors said they were also checking into the 13th body AP reporters identified in April.

“Such grave tortures — we never had such a huge number of them,” Yurii Bielousov, the head of Ukraine’s war crimes department, told the AP and “Frontline.” “That’s why I’m sure that, unfortunately, especially in Bucha, because it was one of the first, lots of mistakes were done at the first stage.”

Some low-level perpetrators may get away due to mismanagement of evidence and procedural challenges, he said, but prosecutions of mid- and top-level commanders won’t be undermined.

For now, the families of Bucha must wait.

What relief Dvornikov’s widow, Yulia Truba, has found did not come from a court. A month after she buried her husband, he came to her in a dream.

“I feel bad without you. How can I talk to you if I already buried you?” she told him in the dream. “I am alive,” he said. His face was luminous.

She jolted awake, weeping. Then she realized his voice was not sad.

“We still have this connection,” she said. “After this, I felt better.”

What she wants Ukraine may not be able to deliver on its own. Truba — along with Skyba and relatives of two other people killed at 144 Yablunska — has filed a case against Russia at the European Court of Human Rights.

She wants the world to recognize how her husband died, his body left for weeks in a trash-filled courtyard.

“All the civilized world must recognize it was murder,” she said. “I want to prove it’s not fake and that it really happened.”

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