Grieving Russians can't believe talk of war crimes in Ukraine

In Stavropol cemetery, there is a new line of graves.

The fresh mounds of earth are covered in a sea of flowers. Decorating the graves, fluttering in the breeze, are military banners with emblems of elite Russian units.

Fixed to wooden crosses are the portraits of soldiers, their names and the dates they died.

The servicemen buried here lost their lives after 24 February: the start of President Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.

At the cemetery I meet Dmitry. He lays red carnations at the grave of his former paratrooper comrade, an officer called Sergei Tysyachny.

“He was like a second father to me and the lads,” Dmitry tells me. “We love him, we respect him and we mourn for him.”

Such praise for a Russian soldier jars with events on the ground in Ukraine. The Kremlin may insist that its military offensive there is necessary and justified. But the UN Secretary-General calls it “a full-fledged invasion… in violation of the UN charter”.

There is also international outrage at reports of apparent Russian military atrocities and alleged war crimes.

“I don’t believe these fakes,” Dmitry says about war crime allegations levelled against some Russian soldiers. “I will never believe them.

“I know how my commander, Sergei, taught us to act. I trust my comrades and my army. They would never do things like this.”

“But investigations are under way,” I continue. “What if you were shown cast-iron evidence that crimes happened? Would you believe it then?”

“I’m sure there will be no evidence,” he replies. “I’m certain.”

This certainty that Russia is right (and the West wrong) is rooted in years of similar messaging here by the state media.

The Kremlin uses its control of television to convince Russians they are living in a besieged fortress, surrounded by enemies – Nato, America, Britain, the EU, to name a few – who are plotting from morning till night to sow chaos in their country.

President Putin’s media monopoly has also helped him to persuade many here that Russians in Ukraine are battling “Nazis”, “neo-Nazis”, “ultra-nationalists” and “liberating Ukraine from fascism” – creating a parallel reality around events there.

Since all independent Russian news sources have either been blocked or shut down, accessing alternative views in Russia has become increasingly difficult.

Sergei Tysyachny’s widow, Lada, agrees to meet me in the centre of Stavropol.

“I didn’t want to believe it. I still can’t completely believe it,” Lada says of the moment she was told her husband had been killed.

She, too, refuses to believe that Russian soldiers have committed atrocities.

“I know that the whole world is against us now,” Lada says. “They’ll accuse Russia of anything.”

And it turns out that Russia will accuse the West – and Western journalists – of anything.

At the end of the day in Stavropol, we find ourselves making the news, not just covering it.

A popular local website has published an article about the BBC’s visit, along with a photograph of my cameraman and me interviewing Lada on a park bench.

Here’s an extract: “It’s easy to guess how the recently widowed resident of Stavropol must have felt talking to journalists from a country that is an accessory to the death of her husband.”

This attempt to link Britain to the deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine shows how Western journalists in Russia are viewed, increasingly, as the enemy.

And how the authorities here are searching for scapegoats for the horrors unfolding in Ukraine.