Putin is copying the propaganda playbook of Serbian war criminals

A year ago, Ukrainian soldiers discovered evidence of the Bucha massacre in which Russian forces slaughtered hundreds of Ukrainians in cold blood. Far from owning up to its crimes, Russia has spent the past 12 months trying to spin the massacre as a Western-inspired conspiracy.  The Kremlin said the allegations are a ‘monstrous forgery’ aimed at denigrating the Russian army. This attempt to whitewash the truth has disturbing parallels with the cover up of atrocities that occurred in my home country, Bosnia, during the 1990s.

There are chilling links between today’s war crimes denialism by Russia and the genocide denialism that continues in Bosnia to this day, over the murder of  more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica in 1995. In fact, the comparison with the Kremlin’s response is so clear that Russia appears to be acting according to the Bosnian-Serb playbook from that era. 

Anti-West conspiratorial narratives, the ruthless crackdown on alternative narratives at home, and the deliberate use of these atrocities to rally domestic support – the similarities are uncanny.