The Russian army is waging a war of annihilation in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin announced it: Ukraine must be "denazified".

The troops murder, rape, loot, torture and kill civilians.

Russian propaganda denies this, accusing the Ukrainians of killing their own people - or that it is a staging.

For the survivors in the areas north of Kyiv occupied by the Russian army until the end of March, who witnessed how civilians were shot by Russian soldiers, this was "blatant mockery".

That's what ARD correspondent Georg Restle said on Tuesday in the "Tagesschau".

He got his own picture of the situation in Butscha, and the program spoke of "atrocities".

Previously, the language rule had been that these were "suspected" war crimes.

Presumed?

The wording was appropriate to the level of knowledge conveyed in the ARD.

But it seemed like a relativization, because others had long since been further along.

Correspondents from "Spiegel", "Bild", CNN and other media were in Bucha before, heard and saw what had happened and reported.

They didn't need to speak of "presumably".

The "presumptive" also invalidated satellite images from the Maxar company, which show that the bodies had been lying in the streets of Bucha for weeks - when the Russians occupied the city.

A video shows a cyclist being shot by a Russian armored car.

There are eyewitness reports, pictures of civilians killed, tortured, maimed;

A video shows how Russian soldiers post the loot they plundered in Ukraine to the post office in Belarus.

There is evidence of war crimes, but it is up to international prosecutors to definitively establish violations of international criminal law.

Some German correspondents have meanwhile argued about the "presumptive" classification.

This is undignified in view of the massacre.

And the dispute doesn't really have a fundamentally press-ethical character.

It has a simple reason: the public broadcasters act as if they were the first and the best.

When ARD chairwoman Patricia Schlesinger at a press conference yesterday included “private, commercial media” in his self-praise for German war reporting, that was patronizing – and wrong.

ARD and ZDF are by no means the first and best.

They are often behind or completely off track like the moderator Markus Lanz.

In his show, in which the reporter Katrin Eigendorf from Kyiv was on and reported on "real massacres", he asked when a reporter became "part of the Ukrainian propaganda".

This wasn't just supposed insanity.