Will Smith decided to hijack the "controversy of the moment" diaspora but now it's time to talk about real crimes that cause real damage.
I'm quoting myself from my Tweet from yesterday (itself a retweet of another retweet) but you can go and have a look because the original one shows a video of what appears to be Ukrainian troops shooting the legs of Russian prisoners:
This needs to be investigated. If there are more reports and POW testimony that Ukrainian forces are shooting prisoners after capture this is a war crime and needs the proper punishment.
What I say in the comment is what I believe: if this is confirmed, it was another case of a war crime, this one committed by the Ukrainian side (not the first, some of the previous videos showing POWs might constitute a war crime as well).
This video caused controversy; first, presented as an extenuating circumstance, is the claim that this is payback for similar acts done by russian solder, as seen on previously shared videos, line one showing an apparent drunk russian soldier shooting one or more civilians in the leg at a checkpoint. To me that can be a sign of the motivation for ukrainians to do the same it's not an excuse.
But of course, Twitter (as this appeared mostly on Twitter) got divided in the argument if this is real or fake, that they might not be Ukrainian soldiers, and that bullets don't make the same type of damage seen on the video.
Do I believe it is fake? As you can see in my first reaction, I don't think it is. To me what is important is to properly investigate and don't let this, and other similar acts, go unpunished, hence my main reason to write about this particular video, so that it's not lost with time (actually, it is mostly so that I don't forget myself). As a clarification, my comment about further reports is not that this is only bad if there are more, is that further reports of episodes such as this, increases the likelihood of this being real (not fake, not staged).
As for this being shocking to those who just thought Russians were the villains and have a binary vision of events (either black or white, either right or wrong), it is a reminder that war is bad and in war people do bad things. People from all sides involved, in some cases people that never hurt a fly before. As someone wrote, although it's a bit extreme but very poignant: War does not determine who is right, only who is left.
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