The diffusion in the international media of the photos taken in Boutcha, a city located northwest of kyiv – photos showing bodies in the street, some with their hands tied behind their backs or partially burned, as well as mass graves –, aroused the fear of the international community.

Westerners accuse Russia of "war crimes" while Moscow denies and speaks of staging the Ukrainians.

"All the signs point to the fact that the victims were deliberately targeted and killed directly. And this evidence is very disturbing", underlined Tuesday April 5 the spokesperson of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Elizabeth Throssell, recalling that international humanitarian law prohibits deliberately attacking civilians, which amounts to a war crime.

For Carole Grimaud Potter, specialist in Russia at the University of Montpellier and founder of Creer (Center for Russia and Eastern Europe Research), interviewed by France 24, the parallel with the abuses committed by the Russian army during the two wars of Chechnya (1994-1996 and 1999-2000) is obvious.

“In Chechnya, every civilian was considered a terrorist. The Russians called that war an 'anti-terrorist operation'. The word 'anti-terrorist' was replaced this time by 'anti-Nazi'. population, target of civilians considered accomplices of this ideology, enemies of the Russians and who must be crushed", she analyzes.

In Chechnya, civilians were “targeted” both on the ground and from the air with bombardments on civilian infrastructure, such as homes, schools and hospitals, specifies the researcher.

Kidnappings, arrests and torture have also taken place.

A strategy aimed "to incite terror, so that civilians submit to the occupier".

Interrogation rooms

 ?

In recent days, Carole Grimaud Potter has recognized similar processes in Boutcha's macabre discoveries.

On Monday, the bodies of five men with their hands tied were found in the basement of a children's sanatorium in the Ukrainian town.

"It immediately reminded me of an interrogation room," she says.

"During the war in Chechnya, the Russians set up 'filtration camps', interrogation centers where Chechen civilian males were arrested and detained for questioning, including under torture."

The researcher draws a parallel with the abduction, on March 12, of Oleh Baturin, a journalist from the Ukrainian city of Kherson, interrogated for eight days by the army and subjected to psychological torture.

"The Russian army seems to apply the same methods."

The "tactical weakness" compensated by "the crushing of civilians"

"The process is the same as in Afghanistan, Syria and the Donbass, that of a military culture of brutality and lethality, a dehumanized military culture," said Jeff Hawn, a specialist in Russian military issues. at the London School of Economics, contacted by France 24. "The institution that the army represents is not concerned with limiting war crimes, there are no courts that punish this. The military has full latitude to slip without any safeguards. So it's a way to encourage this kind of behavior," he adds.

In Grozny, during the first Chechen war, the Russian army had to manage its frustration, having failed to take control of the Chechen capital.

“Composed mainly of conscripts not knowing what to expect, the Russian army had brought long columns of tanks and armored vehicles into the city, certain of overthrowing the Chechen leaders in a flash. were clashed with units of highly motivated Chechen fighters armed with anti-tank missiles. In the space of one night, hundreds of Russian soldiers and armored vehicles had fallen into Chechen ambushes and found themselves trapped flames," said New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall, who witnessed the capture of Grozny in 1995, on March 29.

"The Russian army compensated for its tactical weakness by crushing civilians", analyzes Carole Grimaud Potter, who recalls that 25,000 civilians lost their lives in this conflict.

Under the effect of the bombs, Grozny became "a ravaged lunar landscape. I remember that the buildings were cut in half and that the content of people's lives poured out of their apartments in the open air", describes Carlotta Gall .

In 2003, the United Nations called the Chechen capital the most destroyed city on Earth.

A very different media coverage

However, a world separates the war in Ukraine from the conflict in Chechnya.

"At the end of the 1990s, social networks did not yet exist. Images of the war in Chechnya had been very easily censored", underlines Carole Grimaud Potter.

"NGOs like Memorial worked to document these war crimes. Journalists too, like Anna Politkovskaya, which cost her her life."

The Russian NGO Memorial, which had been investigating Soviet purges for more than thirty years and cataloging contemporary repressions, was also dissolved on December 28 by the Russian Supreme Court.

"Is this decision, which came just weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, a coincidence?" Asks the historian.

Today, Russia has to deal with the information disseminated on the platforms and by the media present in Ukraine, even if access to certain conflict zones such as the city of Mariupol remains very complicated.

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