Nice rabbit-in-the-hat upside down illusion though.BECAUSE THE HORRIFYING truth of what happened in Bucha, Ukraine, during the Russian occupation last month is unpalatable to officials in Moscow, the Russian government has invented a lurid fantasy to tell its own people.
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.
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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.
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[B]ecause 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.
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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.
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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.
The Intercept
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.
If you have need to debunk Russia's claims, it's all laid out, claim by claim in this Intercept article.
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