Bucha, the unprecedented shot of the drone: new evidence on the massacre

New high definition images, shot by a drone in the sky of Bucha between 23 and 30 March last, confirm what was observed through the shots from the satellite of Maxar Technologies, which however showed evident limits from the point of view of resolution. The videos were disseminated by the online newspaper Meduza, publication in Russian language which moved its headquarters from Russia to Latvia in 2014 to stay stay away from the influence of the Kremlin.

Until now, the timing of the Bucha massacre had only been reconstructed through satellite images. The photos, released by Maxar Technologies, refuted the statements of the Russian government: the corpses of civilians in the street, found by the media and Ukrainian forces between 1 and 2 April last on the Yablonska road, had been on that road and in those same positions for at least three weeks. Certainly before the Russian army left the town on March 30th.

The metadata of the files, which contain information such as the place, date and time in which a particular video was shot, made it possible to establish that the aerial images were recorded between March 23 and March 30 last. We carried out a check on the weather conditions in Bucha on March 23 and 30, using a database that allows us to establish whether on a given day in the past, and at a given time, there was for example the sun or rain. In Bucha, on the morning of March 23, 2022, there was full sun. On the morning of March 30, however, the sky was cloudy. The atmospheric conditions therefore coincide with those expressed by the film.

In the first part of the video, the focus is on the stretch of Yablonska road already infamous for the amount of corpses on the asphalt. The second part of the clip, on the other hand, is the most interesting because it shows, for the first time, the presence of a military vehicle in the garden of a house at 10:40 on 23 March.

In this case the image is not clear to the point of establishing with certainty the nature of the medium, but the Meduza newspaper states that it is probably a matter of a Russian airborne craft (a BMD or a BTR-D). Of the same medium, on March 30th, there is no longer any trace. In the video obtained by the Latvian newspaper, at one point, two people close to the military vehicle are also seen, but it was not possible to establish with certainty their belonging to Putin’s armed forces.

Meduza wrote that “these videos were released by the Belarusian neo-Nazi Serhii” Botsman “Korotkykh, whose battalion is fighting for Ukraine.”