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The “Heirs of Goebbels” Report
After March 31, 2026, a twenty-page report titled Heirs of Goebbels: Falsification of the Events in Bucha and Bloody Staged Performances of the Kiev Regime began circulating in English. It is signed by the “International Public Tribunal on the Crimes of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis,” a body chaired by Maksim Grigor’ev, which directs readers to the website of the Russian Fund for the Study of Democracy for the full text. The thesis is already evident in the title: the events in Bucha in March 2022 were allegedly fabricated by Ukraine with the support of Western governments, using a technique that the text compares to the Nazi provocation at Gleiwitz in 1939.
The document deserves careful reading precisely because it does not limit itself to denial. Unlike the Russian denials of April 2022, it builds its argument on verifiable Ukrainian material: the plaques at the memorial, military obituaries, local commemorative sites, and statements from the Presidency. It is on this ground that the discussion must take place. The question I pose here is narrower than that of the report and, I believe, more useful: who actually appears on the Bucha Wall of Remembrance, in what capacity, and what happens when a commemorative category is used as a legal and statistical category. The answer calls into question both those who constructed the official narrative and those who claim to dismantle it.
The structure is simple. After the reference to Gleiwitz, the text lists four methods of falsification that the Ukrainian government allegedly employed: presenting soldiers killed in combat as civilians; attributing deaths caused by Ukrainian fire to Russia; counting elderly people who died of illness among the victims; and the deliberate killing of its own citizens in front of cameras. The stated target is the official claim that the memorial contains “509 names of identified civilians,” a claim that the report attributes to the website of the Ukrainian Presidency, Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk, Euronews, and the European ministers present at the March 31, 2026, commemoration.
The core of the document (pp. 3–12) is a list of about thirty names, each accompanied by a photo of the plaque and, often, a clipping from a Ukrainian news outlet. They can be grouped into five categories. The first category includes individuals identified as members of Azov or affiliated units: Yevhen Petras, Yevhen Vas’kovych, Illia Chrenov, Bohdan Knyshchuk, and Volodymyr Bisaha. The second group consists of regular military personnel: pilot Ruslan Bilous (Belous) of the 7th Tactical Aviation Brigade and his flight crew member Roman Dovhaljuk; sniper Oleh Cymbal of the 80th Air Assault Brigade; Vadym Smetanskyi of the same brigade, a colonel from the SBU, a major from the State Protection Department, and the commander of the guard at the military commissariat in Bucha. The third group consists of members of the territorial defense or volunteer units: Anatoliy Korytko, Serhiy Smyrnov, Oleksandr Blahodatnyi, Andriy Verbovyi, and Mykhailo Boichenko. The fourth list concerns civilians alleged to have taken part in hostile actions: Oleksandr Šarava, who left his home carrying Molotov cocktails on February 27, 2022; Vitalij Fesjuk, an observer who reported on the movements of Russian vehicles; and Oleksandr Bondar, who, according to the Ukrainian press, was conducting reconnaissance for the armed forces. The fifth section concerns people who died outside the city (in Vorzel, Moshchun, Kopylov, Zdvizhevka, Guta-Mezhigorskaya, and Irpen) and a 68-year-old woman, Halyna Semenyuk, who died of cancer.
The report links this list to two legal references that are substantively correct: Article 51, paragraph 3, of the First Additional Protocol, under which civilians lose their protection when and for as long as they directly participate in hostilities, and an explanatory note from the International Committee of the Red Cross on the same principle. Finally, pages 12–20 contain sixteen testimonies regarding Ukrainian bombings “for the cameras.” None of these concern Bucha: the witnesses speak of Avdeevka, Ugledar, Toreck/Dzerzhinsk, Lysychansk, and Kurakhovo, in incidents ranging from 2021 to 2024. The transition from that material to Bucha is conveyed by a single explicit statement: the practice of deliberate killings “allows one to reasonably conclude” that the same occurred there as well.
The legal framework
International humanitarian law defines a civilian by exclusion. According to Article 50 of the First Protocol, a civilian is anyone who does not belong to the armed forces as defined in Article 43—that is, all organized forces, groups, and units placed under a responsible command. In cases of doubt, a person must be considered a civilian, and the presence of non-civilians among the population does not deprive the population of its civilian status. A civilian who directly participates in hostilities remains a civilian but loses protection from attacks for the duration of that participation. The ICRC Interpretive Guidance establishes three cumulative requirements for such participation (a minimum threshold of harm, a direct causal link, and a link to hostilities) and distinguishes between a civilian acting on an episodic basis and a member of an organized armed group with a continuous combat role, who loses protection for the entire duration of that role.
Two additional rules apply to the case of Bucha. The first is the levée en masse: residents of a territory not yet occupied who, as the enemy approaches, spontaneously take up arms without having had time to organize themselves are legitimate combatants if they openly bear arms and comply with the laws of war. The second is domestic. The Ukrainian law “On the Fundamentals of National Resistance,” in effect since January 1, 2022, made the Territorial Defense Forces a component of the Armed Forces and established the volunteer formations of territorial communities (DFTH) as paramilitary units tasked with territorial defense. Under international humanitarian law, those who belonged to these structures were not civilians.
There is, however, one point the report never addresses. Determining that a person was a combatant says nothing about how they died. A combatant who is captured, wounded, or has surrendered is hors de combat, and killing them is a war crime.
In the face of information warfare
According to Western commentators, the report lacks credibility because it contains certain legal inaccuracies. Technical errors may be present, but focusing on the finger while ignoring the moon is a colossal mistake. In Bucha, the crime was committed by the Ukrainians, not the Russians. And there is a heinous crime that has become a propaganda tool, part of an information war that was indispensable to the collective West.
Bucha represented one of the decisive moments in the information war that unfolded around the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. After Russian forces withdrew from the city, images of corpses in the streets and eyewitness accounts gathered on the ground were rapidly disseminated by international media, transforming into a highly potent communication tool. It all happened extremely quickly, with Western media—acting in unison—disseminating the material everywhere, constructing an image of the war as an act of aggression characterized by systematic atrocities, in which Russia was progressively portrayed not only as a military adversary but as the perpetrator of crimes against the civilian population. In this sense, the images possessed a persuasive power greater than that of many diplomatic arguments: the body of the slain civilian became visual evidence capable of condensing an entire interpretation of the conflict into a few frames.
Bucha thus took on a strategic role in Western communications and helped solidify public support for sanctions, Moscow’s diplomatic isolation, and increased political and military aid to Kiev. Observe how a tragic event—as tragic as any war is—was transformed into a weapon of war. No Western media outlet cared about the value of the dead or the truth of their life stories. The only thing that mattered was blaming Russia and justifying the escalation of a senseless conflict.
But the truth comes to light sooner or later.
This is how the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs brought the Bucha case back into the international spotlight. Spokesperson Maria Zakharova stated that Moscow intends to urge the United Nations to reexamine the events, arguing that the UN did not participate directly in the investigations conducted at the time, but instead ended up accepting the version provided by Kiev as the prevailing one. A few days later, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also revisited the incident, denouncing what he considers a typical practice of information warfare: rapidly constructing a narrative, turning it into the dominant truth, and preventing alternative versions from reaching the public.
According to Lavrov, this is precisely the mechanism through which the West consolidated its interpretation of Bucha. The initial narrative occupies the available information space like an empty trench: once it has been seized and defended by the mainstream media, replacing it requires an enormously greater effort. In the case of Bucha, this process prevented a truly impartial examination of the events from the very beginning.
One central question therefore remains: why reopen the Bucha case today? Because Moscow is ready to confront the entire world regarding the lies propagated by the West. And what about the West?
Trump and Burnham: chaos merchants. UK eyes conscription, taxes the dead. Trump hints at annulling midterms.
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Both President Trump and UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham recently met in New York, with both facing tough times ahead as leaders. And it would seem both are choosing chaos over sage governance. But in the case of Trump, Iran might beat him to it.
Events are moving fast in the West as more and more countries’ ruling elites ramp up the rhetoric to go to war with Russia. Recently, in a TV debate in the UK, a staunch pin-striped old-guard conservative agreed with a liberal that a great many people who don’t agree with the plan will need to be locked up – giving the viewer the impression that this was actually more important of an objective than actually killing Russians on the battlefield. In the UK, there is a real momentum towards conscription, which would be inevitable if British soldiers were ever to be sent to the front line in Ukraine. In the U.S., most analysts believe conscription is far away from many of the options for the second half of Trump’s second term in office that are being debated behind closed doors. But as the U.S. economy starts to implode along with most EU states, plus the UK, chaos seems to be inevitable. For Trump, there is a genuine worry that, to avoid impeachment, he will try and annul the midterm elections if they don’t go his way (he has already hinted at this, referring to mail voter fraud). Many top experts, like Professor Bob Pape, believe violence is the preferred derivative from both political groups, and a second wave is coming soon which will make Trump’s January 6 escalation look like a children’s tea party in November. In a recent poll which reached out to both Republicans and Democrats, a staggering 60 percent of those contacted said they preferred a violent discourse in the U.S. – such was the level of discontent and, perhaps more importantly, the lack of faith in both the system and the leaders it produces.
In Britain, the lack of political credibility for its leaders is at such an all-time low point that all the government can do is borrow more money each month to busy itself with its erroneous policies which make no sense to anyone. Thousands of fake asylum seekers continue to leave France’s shores and head to the UK’s, where they are welcomed with blankets, hot drinks and free transportation to take them to their hotels, before they wait to be allocated housing. Some of them merely complain about the poor speed of the internet in their temporary accommodation with the smartphones that the government gives them; others take to the streets and cause mayhem if they do not get what they have deemed to be their birthright. The government has simply lost control of the boats and so ignores the growing numbers. It has also no idea whatsoever how to run Britain effectively, and so rather than assisting big business and attracting foreign direct investment, it prefers just to overspend on social programs while inevitably heading towards higher taxation. When you can’t run government and you haven’t got the skills to drive the economy forward, sooner or later you arrive at the point where Andy Burnham is now: taxing the dead.
Yes, a new inheritance tax is being kicked around now by Burnham, who is rumoured to be looking at calling an early election where he will use the one ace he has to get the edge, he believes, over the conservatives and Reform: re-joining the EU. His ideas will be pretending to care about the poor, assisting more boat people, going to war with Russia, taking a stand against Israel, and of course getting back in the EU. That bag of mad ideas could give him the distance to fool the British public that once again it’s all about policies and nothing to do with the merit of those behind them. Calling an early election is quite smart, though, as it seems that each month that passes Kemi Badenoch looks more attractive to middle Britain, while Nigel Farage’s Reform party appears to be slipping down the popularity polls. The big question is whether Burnham will actually go ahead with a war plan with Russia or just use the constant fear-mongering as a tool to raise defence spending and introduce a conscription.
For Trump, his concerns of staying in power are equal to Burnham’s, and yet the stakes are higher. Could he really plunge the entire U.S. economy into a depression which is going to mean shortages in the grocery stores, higher gas prices and sky-high inflation? It would seem to be inevitable, although we should be deeply sceptical about Trump telling reporters that he will bomb Iran after the midterms. Even Trump is not so stupid as to give away his strategy like that. In reality, he is probably under the allusion – delusion? – that the Iranians are actually afraid of a new, fresh attack on their civilian infrastructure. Of course, they are not, but Trump’s thinking is not sound. In reality, the Iranians are probably planning for the perfect moment to obliterate the entire GCC economy, Israel, or even the nucleus of U.S. military in the region – to send a shock to the Trump administration and the economy which would push most Americans, even Democrats, over a line of tolerance.
Americans will use the midterms to make a statement which doesn’t affect their normal presidential vote and vote massively for Dems, securing at the heart of the strategy to impeach Trump, or at the very least make it impossible for him to carry on with his imbecilic style of being a U.S. president. Americans have had enough, and it will be interesting to see how much Trump could do as President without the support of either house and an impeachment trial hanging over his head. For the big thinkers in Tehran, this is probably their strategy – although one can’t help wondering if they have a dilemma in that if they are going to pull off their major strike before the midterms, might this not give Trump the perfect excuse to annul them before they even start, with “America at war” being the argument? Of course, this is folly, but he might believe he has enough of the establishment in his pocket to give it a run for its money. It would be unprecedented. Like everything Trump does.
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