The myth of Bucha, a 21st-century Timişoara

By Fausto Giudice

The author is the organizer of the Tlaxcala Network, which publishes progressive articles from around the world in various languages. This article is available in full in English, German, French and Italian at tlaxcala-int.blogspot.com, along with information on its author.

April 9. The mayor of Bucha, a residential suburb of 36,000 people northwest of Kiev, Ukraine, announced April 1 that the city was “liberated” the day before, on March 31, from Russian occupiers. At the same time, the Ukrainian police announced that they had launched a hunt for “saboteurs” and “Russian agents disguised as civilians.” 

On April 2, Ukrainian lawyer Ilya Novikov posted on his Facebook page a video from a Ukrainian Telegram page.  This one-minute, nine seconds long video shows a convoy of Ukrainian tanks moving down a street in Bucha. Twelve bodies can be counted; one body had his hands tied behind his back with a white bandage. 

Invisible corpses in Bucha

In the hours that followed, the entire “social media sphere,” and then the mainstream media, went wild. “The Russians committed war crimes in Bucha; they massacred 300 civilians.”  No one has seen these 300 corpses.  Some photos show black bags which supposedly contained bodies. It’s easy to believe that they contain dead bodies, but there is no explanation of when and how these deaths occurred.   

The photos and videos followed one another in total chaos.  The same body appears in different photos in different places. Bodies appear, disappear and reappear with different details. Some photos show bodies with their hands tied behind their backs, others show white armbands on their arms. 

During the month in which Russian troops occupied Bucha and the surrounding areas, civilians were encouraged to wear white armbands to show that they were non-hostile civilians. Ukrainian civilians and military and paramilitary personnel wore blue armbands. 

According to the dominant narrative, the Russian military killed civilians who were not hostile to them. They are therefore as “crazy” as their leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the “Great Satan” of 2022.

At the same time and then after the media and social networks (publicized the video and photos),  the politicians entered the dance: U.S. President Joe Biden,  Ursula von der Leyen (president of the European Commission) and Josep Borrell (High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy), all denounced the “war crime of Bucha.” Russia has been denied the right to speak and vote in the United Nations Human Rights Council. 

Ukrainian President Volydymyr Zelensky, the “servant of the people,” the eternal hero of a never-ending soap opera, called for a “Nuremberg Tribunal for Putin.” And finally, here is the Pope himself, in a scene worthy of Italian movie comic Nanni Moretti, brandishing and kissing a Ukrainian flag “from the martyred city of Bucha,” during a ceremony in which he gives Easter eggs to Ukrainian children. 

Ukrainian flag honors Cossacks

No media outlet that published photos or the video of the scene explained what was written on the flag: “Fourth Cossack Centuria of Maidan.” The Centuria (“sotnya”) was the basic unit of the Cossacks [mounted] troops of the various armies in which they served. During what Radio Free Europe dubbed the “Euromaidan” of 2013-2014, the security service organized by the politician Andriy Parubiy, initially a neo-Nazi and later a weathervane, was structured in groups with poetic names that evoked  Ukraine’s “glorious past” – in  other words, the fight against “Judeo-Bolshevism”!

So much for Bucha. Why Bucha? Is it because in English, Bucha inevitably evokes “butcher”? But who would be the butcher in chief of Bucha? There are two opposing theories [about who would fit this role, represented by two individuals]: Azatbek Asanbekovitch Omurbekov and Serhii Korotkykh. 

Omurbekov is a lieutenant-colonel of unit 51460 of the 64th Separate Russian Motorized Rifle Brigade. He is a Kyrgyz according to some sources, a Karakalpak according to others.  His grandfather and father served in the Red Army and his brother belongs to the FSB [Federal Security Bureau]. 

Korotkykh, born in 1974, nicknamed “Malyuta” in Ukrainian and “Botsman” in Russian, is a Belarusian neo-Nazi and, a member of the Russian fascist organization RNE (Russian National Unity), which he left to found the National Socialist Society. 

He is a founder of the NGO Zirka, “Dawn” (Protection and Reconstruction of the Country), suspected of a series of murders and assaults in Belarus and then in Ukraine, where he has been active since 2014. Incorporated into the Azov Battalion (a neo-Nazi wing of the Ukrainian military), he was naturalized Ukrainian in December 2014 during a ceremony where (former Ukrainian) President Petro Poroshenko thanked him for his services. 

In May 2015, Korotkykh became the head of the newly created Police Service for the Security of Strategic Objects and headed it until 2017. He also had dealings with Foxtrot-13, a police-run security company. In 2020, Ian Beletsky, one of the authors of a file on Korotkykh, published by the Institute for National Policy, accusing him, among other things, of being an FSB agent, was kidnapped and severely beaten in the vicinity of Kiev, by the “usual suspects.”

Korotkykh arrived in Bucha with his men in early April. Imagine what kind of “humanitarian” work they dedicated themselves to: burying corpses or producing them?

‘Dracula of Bucharest’ and other myths 

The Bucha staging will go down in history as the “detail” that tipped Ukraine into the European Union, another mountain of exquisite corpses in the closets of Brussels. Enough to definitively dethrone the ghostly “4,630 corpses of Timişoara, (city in western Romania), victims of the communist ‘Dracula of Bucharest’” that made the front page of the free and democratic press, from “Le Figaro” to “Libération.” 

This was an exemplary media invention now taught in journalism schools, dating from a prehistoric time (December 1989), when the Internet did not exist, but when a poor Romanian speaking a foreign language could sell any hoax to a media thirsty for a “scoop.” 

Some examples I remember: Nicolae “Ceaușescu had an underground highway dug from his palace to the Black Sea (225 km),” “Securitate uses Arab snipers to shoot pro-democracy demonstrators,” and “Elena Ceaușescu had a fridge full of roast beef in her palace (human meat, of course).”  

And the most beautiful: “Ceaușescu, suffering from leukemia, needed to change his blood every month.” Young people drained of their blood would have been discovered in the Carpathian forest. Ceaușescu a vampire? How can we believe it? The rumor had announced mass graves which were found in Timişoara. And they are not the last. (French television channel TF1)