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<\/a>, satellite images<\/a>, and witness testimony<\/a>. 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 \u2014 showing dead bodies lining a street in the Kyiv suburb hour after hour.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0\u2014 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<\/a> sprawled on the pavement along Bucha’s Yablonska Street was also stamped with the word “fake,” written in red letters in English and Russian.<\/p>\n A screenshot from Russian state television shows the word “fake,” in English and Russian, partially covering video of civilians killed during the Russian occupation of Bucha. The graphic also gives the wrong date for the footage.<\/p>\n \nPhoto: Channel One Russia<\/p><\/div>\n As a result of this strategy, millions of Russians have been bombarded with images of Bucha’s dead and urged to direct their anger over the murders onto fictional Ukrainian or Western perpetrators, not the Russian soldiers who controlled the city when these civilians were gunned down.<\/p>\n That’s how the video of dead bodies on Yablonska Street was framed on the evening news on Russia’s Channel One. As the images that shocked the world were shown to Russian viewers last week, a news anchor in Moscow read a conspiratorial script<\/a> that echoed the Russian Defense Ministry’s false claim<\/a> that two of the bodies appeared to move before the clip was over, supposedly proving that the crime scene was faked with the use of actors.<\/p>\n On Sunday, Russian state television broadcast video of the dead in Bucha, but in a conspiratorial report that echoed false claims from defense officials in Moscow who mistakenly said two of the figures could be seen moving and so must be crisis actors just pretending to be dead. pic.twitter.com\/3kTC58oMIf<\/a><\/p>\n — Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) April 7, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"040922_antifake3\"](\"https:\/\/prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org\/wp-uploads\/sites\/1\/2022\/04\/040922_antifake3-1000x580.jpg\")
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