I read the report.
And there is a principle worth defending here, even when the evidence comes from people whose conclusion I distrust:
If this report has correctly identified servicemen, people killed elsewhere, or people who died from unrelated causes among the 509 names officially described as civilians on Bucha’s memorial, correct the memorial.
Those are factual claims. They can be checked name by name.
And if they’re right, they’re right.
Evidence does not become false because Moscow found it.
But evidence does not become larger because Moscow found it either.
And that is where this report makes an extraordinary leap.
A wrongly classified soldier establishes a classification error.
A person killed elsewhere establishes an error in the memorial record.
A death from illness establishes an incorrect cause of death.
Testimony alleging shelling elsewhere deserves investigation on its own merits.
None of those findings establishes that the documented killings in Bucha were staged.
Because the evidence for those killings does not begin—or end—with this wall.
The UN documented the killings of 73 civilians in Bucha, which was under Russian control from 5 to 30 March 2022, and was corroborating another 105 alleged killings.
Human Rights Watch interviewed residents, medical workers, emergency responders and witnesses; examined physical evidence, photographs, video and satellite imagery; and documented apparent summary executions, unlawful killings, enforced disappearances and torture.
And then there is a basement.
At a children’s camp on Vokzalna Street, Human Rights Watch saw five men’s bodies after Russian forces withdrew.
The men were in civilian clothes and appeared to have been shot.
Four had their hands zip-tied behind their backs.
HRW found extensive evidence that Russian forces had occupied the camp. It also appropriately recorded what it could not establish: the circumstances in which those five men came to be detained there remained unclear.
That uncertainty matters.
Because the standard cannot be believe every allegation from one side and dismiss every allegation from the other.
It has to be simpler than that:
What does the evidence actually establish?
Correct every error the evidence establishes.
Investigate every allegation by the same standard.
But don’t confuse correcting a catalogue with disproving the event the catalogue commemorates.
A counterexample can challenge a category.
It cannot erase a crime scene.
The report has given us names to check.
Now explain the four pairs of bound hands in the basement.
Maria Dubovikova
Anton Gerashchenko
