April 4, 2023
In late March, the United Nations
issued a new report on war crimes being committed by both Russian and Ukrainian
forces. The document provides a shocking litany of brutal behavior on the part
of both militaries, although the investigators concluded that Russian units
have committed the majority of offenses. Given the extent of Western pressure
and the UN’s own biases, it is hard to determine the accuracy of that
conclusion. However, the evidence cited of Ukrainian abuses is far from
trivial.
Yet if one examines accounts about the
report in Western news media outlets, the inescapable conclusion would be that
Russian troops were responsible for virtually all of the atrocities.
Unfortunately, such journalistic malfeasance has typified press coverage of the
war since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Western publications have systematically buried evidence of misconduct on the
part of Ukraine’s government.
Headlines in the Western press about
the new UN report were almost uniformly inflammatory and one-sided. The
Associated Press headline was "UN-backed inquiry accuses Russia of war
crimes in Ukraine." The sole mention of Ukraine war crimes in a
15-paragraph news story was one very brief comment far down in the text that
"the report’s authors had noted a small number of apparent
violations" by Ukrainian forces.
The headline in the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation’s coverage was "Russia has committed ‘wide range’
of war crimes in Ukraine." As in the case of the AP story, the CBC’s
account barely mentioned evidence of Ukrainian war crimes and used language
nearly identical to the bland phrasing that AP utilized. Again, the description
was of a "small number" of "apparent" human rights
violations. Even that biased analysis was better than the BBC’s performance,
which managed to avoid any mention of Ukrainian war crimes contained in the UN
report.
BuzzFeed’s account of the report was
the epitome of bias as well, starting with the headline "A nightmarish new
report has detailed Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine." The sole
acknowledgment of Kyiv’s misconduct was a brief passage buried in the middle of
the story that UN investigators had found a "few instances" of
Ukrainians violating international law.
The New York Times avoided the use of
a biased headline, but the substance of the article exhibited that
characteristic thoroughly. The only example of Ukrainian forces committing war
crimes cited in a lengthy article was minimized as "Two cases of
ill-treatment of Russian soldiers by Ukrainian forces were also
documented." As noted below, the actual number appeared to be much larger,
but the Times failed to disclose that detail.
Some foreign news outlets provided
more balanced coverage than did their Western counterparts. Al Jazeera’s
headline, for example, was "UN decries torture, killing of Ukrainian and
Russian POWs." The story subsequently quoted Matilda Bogner the head of
the UN monitoring mission that "We are deeply concerned about the summary
execution of up to 25 Russian prisoners of war and persons ordered to combat by
Ukrainian armed forces, which we have documented." Al Jazeera did not hold
back on concluding that there had been an even greater number of such
executions of Ukrainian POWs, (the UN report put the figure at 68), but unlike
many of its competitors, it did not whitewash Kyiv’s war crimes.
One of the rare analyses in the U.S.
press that didn’t exhibit flagrant bias and cherry-picking of data in the UN
report was an account by Stephen Neukam in The Hill. Despite a typically
one-sided, anti-Russian headline, Neukam’s article mentioned early on that the
"new U.N. report released this week said both Russia and Ukraine had
committed war crimes." He described in detail the evidence of Russian
crimes that the UN investigators discovered, but he didn’t ignore passages that
confirmed Ukrainian violations and abuses. Among other offenses, the report
"found that the Ukrainian military has likely used cluster munitions and
anti-personnel landmines in Russian-controlled areas, leading to ‘grave
civilian injuries’ and deaths."
Once again, most Western media outlets
have failed to provide even a tolerably balanced picture of developments in the
Russia-Ukraine war. Instead, they have served as conduits for pro-Ukrainian,
anti-Russian propaganda. There is no dispute that Russian forces in Ukraine
have behaved brutally, and that serious violations of international norms have
taken place. However, it is irresponsible journalism to downplay Ukraine’s
human rights abuses or to pretend that many of Russia’s actions (e.g., bombing
civilian areas) the UN report documents are qualitatively different from what
the United States and its allies have done in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, and other
arenas. It’s entirely possible to rightly condemn Moscow’s conduct without
exhibiting shameless bias. Yet the Western news media have failed that test
once again.
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