Russia’s African Empire

Last week, at roughly the time that photographs and stories began to filter out of liberated Bucha in Ukraine, the NGO Human Rights Watch published a report of similar massacres which took place contemporaneously in rural Mali. What linked the two was the identity of the perpetrators. In Ukraine and across Africa, these atrocities are committed by Russians.

Russia’s War on Non-Combatants

When Ukrainian forces retook Bucha, a neighbourhood in the Kyiv province, from the armed forces of Russia in early April, their cameras captured horrors. Civilians lying dead at the roadside. Mass graves. Dozens of those killed had their hands tied behind their backs.