Starobilsk, the Ukrainian massacre that the Kremlin wants to turn into a symbol

Starobilsk, occupied UkraineAs soon as we set foot in the student residence in Starobilsk, in the occupied Luhansk region, it became clear that this was not a command post of the elite drone branch of the Russian army, as Kyiv claims. Last Friday, Ukrainian aircraft killed 21 young people there, mostly girls, who were sleeping at the time of the attack, and injured dozens more. Ukraine's denial and the West's silence pushed Russian diplomacy to organize a guided tour for foreign journalists to the scene of the tragedy. The expedition, in which ARA participated and which took place hours after a massive retaliatory bombing by Moscow, became an attempt by the Kremlin to accuse Volodymyr Zelensky of a war crime and to impose its narrative on the international community. Last Friday, Ukrainian aircraft killed 21 young people there, mostly girls, who were sleeping at the time of the attack, and injured dozens more. Ukraine's denial and the West's silence pushed Russian diplomacy to organize a guided tour for foreign journalists to the scene of the tragedy. The expedition, in which ARA participated and which took place hours after a massive retaliatory bombing by Moscow, became an attempt by the Kremlin to accuse Volodymyr Zelensky of a war crime and to impose its narrative on the international community.

The Russian government's interest is such that they expressly chartered a plane to a military base in southern Russia and escorted us to the city, about 70 kilometers from the front line, cutting off traffic for us and bypassing all army checkpoints. Once at the scene of the incident, the upper floors of the building bore witness to the destruction. Inside the small rooms, with two bunk beds each, rubble covered the sheets, clothes, photos, posters, and stuffed animals with which the victims were sleeping at the time of the attack. Amidst the crunching of broken glass and the smell of dust and ash, the soldier accompanying us, Yelena Markovskaya, flatly denied that there was any military installation nearby. We could not verify this.

Near the residence, in front of the remains of the university college where young people studied to become teachers, the Russian commissioner for human rights, Iana Lantratova, described the attack as a "war crime" and accused Ukrainians of "deliberately murdering children". With the aim of appealing to international law, the authorities state that the deceased were between 14 and 18 years old, data that does not match the birth dates published by the administration itself, which indicate that all the people who lost their lives there were between 18 and 23 years old.

Hours before the visit, the Russian army had launched nearly 700 drones and 90 missiles against Ukrainian cities, including the Oreshnik, intended to become the most powerful weapon in the Russian arsenal and which had only been used twice in the entire war. When asked if the deaths of young Ukrainians in Russian bombings, a circumstance that has been repeated over the last four years, should be condemned in the same way, Lantratova limited herself to responding:

Voiceless victims

However, in Starobilsk, civilians had no voice; only the authorities did. The few residents of the town who gathered near the devastated area refused to speak to international journalists in the presence of the police. The tour organizers took us to the hospital where the injured and their families were admitted, but, unlike the Russian media, we were not allowed access. Representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs justified this by the severity of the injuries, although they admitted the victims' low predisposition to communicate with foreign journalists. Subsequently, the Russian governor of Luhansk, Leonid Pasechnik, appeared at the entrance of the center to declare that "these kinds of fascist acts in the 21st century are unacceptable."

This was the latest example of an effort designed to remotely control and politicize the narrative of events. Instead of presenting us with the disaster in its raw state and facilitating testimonies from those affected, we were only allowed to interact with the authorities, to the point of offering a misleading image: that of a group of people dressed in black, holding photos of dead students, who turned out to be officials. We were also not allowed to deviate from the marked route, which did not include the memorial honoring the victims, just a few hundred meters from the ruined building.

Furthermore, the Kremlin wanted to turn the presence of international journalists into a central element of its propaganda campaign. As soon as we got off the bus in Starobilsk, a crowd of Russian journalists was already waiting for us to film us. Insistently, we were the target of state media cameras, which pressured us to make statements about how we felt after contemplating the degree of destruction and whether it all seemed like a staged event or was real. And the answer is that it was all real: the 21 dead, the Oreshnik against Kyiv as retaliation, and Moscow's spectacle of instrumentalizing grief.