I think I’ve mentioned before that Viktoria is using and monitoring several new groups on Viber (like a What’sApp, but more popular in Eastern Europe) for information about people and places in Mariupol. I was watching over her shoulder and there’s one group specifically for the 110 and 108 apartment blocks (her mother and son lived in 110); other groups focus on different parts of the city. When these groups first came up, they were useful to people, not just for sharing information but also for commiserating and sharing their grief and memories.

In yet another example of “why we can’t have nice things,” people for Russia have been finding and “invading” these groups, to the point now, according to V, it’s now half-and-half people with sincere interests in being there and “trolls.” (My word, not hers.) These Russians aren’t coming to these channels seeking out the information they aren’t getting from their state media channels. No, they’re coming to tamp down any counter-narrative to what they’ve been told.

V was telling me about how most people just deny everything. “There is no war. All the destruction is coming from the Ukrainians. They’re the ones destroying cities and killing civilians just to make Russia look bad. Everyone in Ukraine is a Nazi or under the control of Nazis which is just as bad.” One post yesterday was from a woman who was taking that line, but added that if there were any bombings in Ukraine by the Russian military, it would have been done so with pinpoint accuracy.

There have already been official denials about the atrocities discovered in Bucha and elsewhere. Russia is claiming that they couldn’t have done it because they left the area on March 31 and the pictures didn’t start showing up until the Ukrainians got there on April 2. You know, the innocence plea of a 5-year-old: It couldn’t have been me because to you didn’t see me do it. Of course, there is a lot of satellite imagery from mid-March showing much of the killing that Russians had already been doing — and not bothering to cover up. Nevertheless, just as 80 years after WWII there are still Holocaust deniers making wild, unsubstantiated claims, I’m sure we can look forward to a whole new crop of Russian and Russia-support chatterers denying what happened in Bucha.