Mick Hartley

More details have emerged on the horrors of Russia's Ukrainian invasion:

In grainy CCTV footage from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, nine men with their heads bowed hurry across a muddy street at gunpoint, each clutching the waist of the man in front. Only one will survive the coming massacre.

Chilling footage and intercepted phone calls released on Friday have revealed how Russian soldiers rounded up civilians in the town , with one soldier reportedly telling his mother they had orders to kill “everyone”.

The investigation, by the Associated Press and PBS, added to the mountain of evidence that the mass-killings in Bucha were intended to neutralise resistance and terrorise locals into submission.

The massacre in Bucha came to light in April as Russian troops retreated from the once quiet suburb, leaving behind streets strewn with dead civilians.

More than 450 bodies have since been recovered, with nearly 40 of them discovered along a single street where Russian troops held and tortured local residents in an industrial building serving as their headquarters….

Footage from several CCTV cameras in Bucha, provided by the Ukrainian government, showed the scenes of terror that preceded the massacre.

In one of them, a Russian soldier escorts three people with bags, a suitcase and a dog into the building that was later to be revealed to be a Russian torture chamber.

The footage of the nine men being led across the street was filmed at the same location.

All except one were killed by Russian troops after they discovered they had manned a checkpoint nearby in a desperate volunteer attempt to protect their country, Ukrainian officials said….

Friday’s investigation also included eyewitness testimony saying the violence was not random.

“The Russians hunted down on lists prepared by their intelligence services and went door to door to identify potential threats,” said one Bucha resident.

“Those who didn’t pass this filtration, including volunteer fighters and civilians suspected of assisting Ukrainian troops, were tortured and executed.”

Ukrainian officials say the pattern of the killings suggest that the Russian soldiers were murdering civilians in cold blood, on orders from their commanders.

“The results of the criminal evidence we have gathered so far reveal it wasn’t just isolated incidents of military personnel making a mistake but a systematic policy targeting the Ukrainian people,” Tamas Semkiv, Ukraine’s lead prosecutor for the Bucha massacre, told the AP and PBS.

Ukrainian prosecutors named Russia’s 76th Guards Airborne Assault Division as responsible for the atrocities and are pursuing the commander, Maj Gen Sergei Chubarykin and his boss, Col Gen Alexander Chaiko, on war crimes charges.

Bucha became a by-word for Russian atrocities in Ukraine after investigators, the military and journalists first visited the town in early April, only to find contorted bodies – some of them with hands tied behind their backs – lying around on the side of the road.

Yet still the calls continue for Ukraine to sue for peace. As Lawrence Freedman argues, Putin has no interest in negotiations: a continuing war is his only hope of clinging on to power. These calls for peace are in effect calls for Ukraine to give up the fight and surrender to the Russian killers.

For instance, from Fraser Nelson in the Spectator: Is now the time to make peace in Ukraine? As though it's just those pesky Ukrainians who are being awkward, and need to be told to give up and accept their fate to save us all from the embarrassment of this horrible war.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, British press and public opinion has been firmly behind Volodymyr Zelensky. But is it healthy to look at any subject so uncritically? If a year or more of fighting will achieve nothing, then why prolong the bloodshed? The How To Academy has just held a debate about this delicate subject in London. The motion was ‘Now is the Time To Make Peace in Ukraine’. I went along, with some of the Spectator team. Our colleague Svitlana Morenets, who writes our weekly Ukraine email, was speaking against the motion. It was a fascinating debate.

Peter Hitchens, opening for the motion, said that the British press was very good at whipping up fervour for war but not so good at campaigning for peace. His main quarrel, he said, is with countries who are ‘using Ukraine as a battering ram for reasons of their own’. Responsible citizens in our country, he said, ‘should question this a lot more than we do’. Mary Dejevsky, also supporting the motion, said that some British politicians are now speaking for Ukraine’s interests a bit better than they do British national interests. Ukraine, she said, had made things tougher for itself by bombing the Crimea bridge: it was warned not to by its allies, she said, and now Russia is taking our Ukrainian power plants in retaliation. Things are getting out of control. British support for Ukraine, Dejevsky said, is already starting to wane and Ukraine’s ‘blitz spirit’ may not last.

Mary Dejevsky was – is – a long-time Putin fan: a "swooning fangirl" as Private Eye put it, who was popping up relentlessly across the UK media early this year as a "Russian expert" telling everyone that her beloved Vladimir ("sincere and approachable") would never do anything as foolish as to invade Ukraine. It was all part of "the long history of western misunderstanding of what Putin is about". After the invasion she went quiet for a bit but is clearly back now, unabashed and unrepentant.

As for Peter Hitchens, well…the same contrarian instinct as brother Christopher, but without the wit and the intelligence – and usually on the wrong side.

At least the motion was defeated.