Bucha - the Russian Srebrenica

For six weeks the Russian military have been killing civilians indiscriminately and deliberately, targetng apartment blocks without concern for the residents inside. Now in a small town outside Kyiv called Bucha, bodies have been found lying in the streets after the withdrawal of Russian invading troops. Already there are reports linking the Bucha killings to the mass slaughter of men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica by the Serbs in July 1995 in the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. More than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim males were forced out of Srebrenica up into the hills above the town and mown down. The slaughter in Bucha appears not to be on that scale but the brutal and dismissive murder of civilians as part of an attempt to create terror in Ukrainian communities is a war crime. Vladimir Putin has been claiming that his troops were sent into Ukraine to de-Nazify the country. But he and his army have acted exactly like the Nazis in the Second World War, killing civilians to try and force the country into submission.The man in charge of the Serb army whose troops were responsible for the Srebrenica killings was General Ratko Mladic. He was captured and sent to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague and was sentenced to life imprisonment. It will never happen but wouldn't it be a triumph for the free world if Putin and his two henchmen, Sergei Shoigu, defence mnister, and General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian general staff, were arrested on a war crimes warrant and delivered to the judges at The Hague tribunal.