Faced with the terrible images of dozens of bodies of civilians slaughtered in the streets of Boutcha, near kyiv, in early April, most presidential candidates had condemned the abuses committed.
For his part, and like many supporters of Vladimir Putin, former presidential candidate Eric Zemmour called for “caution”:
You should be careful. We must be sure that these massacres are the work of Russian troops. We remember Timisoara […] There has been a lot of image manipulation
Eric Zemmour
His opponent Marine Le Pen, qualified for the second round, also felt that “it is not on the set of France Inter that we decide what happened, who is guilty” – before casting doubt in turn on the responsibility for the abuses committed.
What is it about ?
The balance sheets continue to soar: this Sunday, Ukraine now reports 1,200 bodies discovered in the kyiv region after the departure of Russian troops.
Including more than 300 for the city of Boutcha alone, northwest of the Ukrainian capital.
To date, we have 1,222 people killed, for the kyiv region alone
Iryna Venediktova, Prosecutor General
In total, for the whole country, it reported 5,600 investigations opened for alleged war crimes since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24.
At the beginning of April, Ms. Venediktova had counted 410 dead civilians whose bodies had been found after the withdrawal of Russian forces from the kyiv region, including nearly 300 in Boutcha. And estimated that tens or even hundreds of other bodies had not yet been found.
Bodies sometimes found with their hands tied behind their backs, in the middle of the street. Vladimir Putin and Russian propaganda deny any responsibility for these abuses, and accuse kyiv of “staged”. To date, there is no concrete evidence to certify such a hypothesis, on the other hand the testimonies mentioning massacres committed by the Russians are legion.
Many online publications try to discredit the countless videos showing bodies, sometimes going so far as to present them as comedians, alive and well.
Others, like Eric Zemmour, believe that it is “possible” that these are bodies “installed” on purpose in the middle of the street, to make believe in abuses by the Russian army. Like in Timisoara in 1989.
What happened in Timisoara?
Flashback: Timisoara is a Romanian city made famous at the end of 1989 by a dark affair: shortly before the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, at the head of a Romania shaken by monster demonstrations, Timisoara appears on television screens around the world .
In the streets of the city, bodies lined up. Fifteen, twenty at most remains, lined up on the ground. No more, at least on screen.
But here it is: first, media around the world report several thousand victims, 4632 according to AFP, up to 7600 sometimes, killed “either by bullets or by bayonet” across the country. Sources: Hungarian, East German and Yugoslav press agencies.
We are at the end of the 1980s, and in a dictatorship: the information circulates badly, even not. Internet does not exist. On the spot, several journalists warn against a possible manipulation, in vain.
Then, crazy hypotheses appear: opponents executed by Ceaucescu’s terrible Securitate in order to satisfy the dictator’s blood transfusion needs, torture chambers where prisoners are disfigured with acid…
It will later be discovered, in January, that the dead exhibited in Timisoara were in fact bodies dug up from the local destitute cemetery. We still do not know, in 2022, who “mounted” the manipulation.
Why is it risky to mention Timisoara to talk about Boutcha?
Summoning Timisoara in 2022 to discredit the massacres committed in Ukraine is more than delicate.
First, the media situation is very different: in 1989, without internet, with extremely difficult telecommunications from Romania, the reporters on the spot were not heard. Or not enough, not soon enough. However, most of them, as Marc Semo recounts in Le Parisien, had not confirmed these facts put forward by foreign press agencies:
Communications between Paris and what was happening on the ground were very complicated, and having a telephone line was the cross and the banner. I was the victim of a media hype
Marc Semo, journalist
Reporters Without Borders also recalls that on the ground, approaching Timisoara was extremely complicated.
The media had engaged in fierce competition, taking up badly sourced information, in what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “the circular circulation of information”.
In 2022, dozens or even hundreds of Ukrainian and foreign journalists, from all countries, are on site in Ukraine and testify directly to the events committed on the spot. With the exception of the Russian press, now muzzled by the power even in the law, all confirm the reality of these abuses.
As historian Adrien Nonjon confided to us, “we are no longer used to it in Europe, but we must not forget that we are in a situation of war. It’s violent to see, but it’s part of the reality. Atrocities are committed on both sides, but one difference is clear: it was Russia that invaded Ukraine, and the testimonies unanimously report a very large number of atrocities committed by the Russian side.
Then, “nothing happened” in Timisoara: if the name of the city remained famous for the false mass graves, the terrible Securitate of Ceaucescu did indeed sow terror in the country.
Thus, in total, nearly a thousand people perished during the Romanian revolution, including a hundred in Timisoara alone. The staging of the fake mass grave was already part of the war of images. But the discovery of the deception does not imply the absence of civilian casualties.
Finally, compared to the situation in 1989, we now have a large number of tools and means to verify the existence or not of such manipulation – if only satellite images, accessible to all, in any point of the globe.
Those of the company Maxar technologies, for example, make it possible to deny the allegation of Moscow, which ensured that the bodies had “appeared” well after the departure of the Russian troops:
We can indeed distinguish the bodies of the victims from the end of March, just before the departure of the Russian troops. Many other such examples exist.
The same goes for the many videos, sometimes truncated, made up or simply misinterpreted: in most cases, other images exist that allow you to obtain the opposite point of view, or to see a part that was hidden, etc And, in the case of the Boutcha massacres, to confirm their sad reality.
The fact remains that the investigations are only in their infancy, and that the trauma of Timisoara has left a lasting mark on the editorial staff: if there is no doubt that the Russians have committed abuses against civilians in Ukraine, it is impossible to list precisely which, where, when, how and why.