In the news from the war that the Russian army unleashed in Ukraine, there is a sentence in almost every report that puts the preceding in a reporting subjunctive.
"The information," it says, "cannot initially be verified independently." Or: "The information cannot be independently verified." Or they could not be verified "by an independent party".
However, the "independent side" often does not exist because the attackers are the first to eliminate their representatives.
The Russian army is hunting down reporters, and Russian soldiers shot dead the Ukrainian photographer Maks Levin.
From the town of Bucha, 25 kilometers north-west of Kyiv, we are now receiving reports, pictures and videos, which sometimes say: "The authenticity could not be checked independently".
What is meant are images of corpses, of dead people lying on the street, in gardens, in cars, in houses.
One of the victims had their hands tied behind their backs.
This is how it looks in Bucha after the withdrawal of the Russian troops.
The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, speaks of genocide.
And that's exactly what it should be.
Because this is about the murder of unarmed civilians, about people who were killed because they are Ukrainians.
This is now also “independently confirmed”.
Reporters from the news agencies AFP and Reuters have accompanied Ukrainian soldiers in Bucha. There are plenty of photos of the massacre, including some that newspapers and online media do not show, or if they do, then only with a clear warning.
"Graphic Content" in the photo database
In the jargon of photojournalism, this is called "graphic content".
The agencies' image databases have been full of "disturbing content" from the Ukraine war from day one, with increasing intensity.
Graphic content from Mariupol, graphic content from Bucha, one cannot imagine how many war crimes are committed in the other areas of Ukraine controlled by the Russian army, whose testimonies are called graphic content.
"We must relentlessly investigate these crimes committed by the Russian military," says Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is once again behind the curve.
The indictment against Vladimir Putin before the International Criminal Court in The Hague should have been written long ago: Grozny and Aleppo lay before Bucha and Mariupol.