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. According to Russian news anchors, correspondents, and pundits, the apparent crime scene discovered after the Russian retreat was a monstrous plot to frame Russian soldiers as war criminals, carried out by Ukraine’s intelligence service and its Western partners.
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...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...