Bucha and Gaza: selective morality of international order

Bucha is not only a tragedy of civilian deaths, but it is also an episode that defines the information war surrounding the two ongoing major conflicts – the war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East. Russian forces occupied the Town of Bucha, near Kyiv, in Feb 2022 and withdrew in March 2022 as the Ukrainian forces took control. According to reports, over 400 bodies of civilians were recovered from the town after the Russian withdrawal. Ukraine and Russia present conflicting accounts of the event. Ukraine attributes the killings to Russian forces during their occupation, claiming that independent satellite imagery, witness accounts and UN investigations have documented killings during the Russian occupation. Russia denies responsibility, insisting that these killings were staged after its withdrawal.

Given the nature of modern warfare and the rising number of war crimes being committed, I will examine the Bucha tragedy, deliberate upon the concept of the politics of victimhood, compare the Western response to Bucha versus Gaza, and highlight the current crisis of international morality. Let me first raise two fundamental questions about international morality. The first is about the selective application of international morality, and the second is about the geopolitical exploitation of any given tragedy by building and deploying suitable narratives. The first question is based on the premise that some victims receive greater international sympathy and support while the others don't. The second question is based on the premise that it is not the investigation process of the innocent dead but claiming high moral ground that occupies the attention of world politics.

There is a politics of victimhood in international relations that deserves closer examination. For any nation, historical suffering can establish a legitimate claim to sympathy, but does it provide a licence for inflicting suffering and killing on others? Israel's historical experience of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, remains one of humanity's great tragedies. But should the state of Israel invoke this historical victimhood in denying Palestinians their rights and subjecting them to the consequences of occupation and devastating military campaigns? The selective application of international morality can be judged from the fact that by February 2026, UNICEF was reporting more than 71,800 Palestinians killed since October 2023, including at least 21,289 children. Despite this enormous scale of civilian suffering, Israel retained important political, economic and diplomatic relationships with European countries.

The same victimhood distinction must be made about our understanding of Ukraine. Ukraine was not a peaceful country without an internal conflict when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Since 2014, the Donbas region has experienced an armed conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatist forces. Ukraine's suffering under Russian military operations is real, but the conflict in Donbas had already claimed thousands of lives before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Given that Ukraine had already lost Crimea to Russia in 2014, its posture as a victim - much like Israel's - facilitated its efforts to secure greater Western sympathy and support against Russian aggression. Thus, consistent promotion of tragedy in Bucha helps Ukraine's victimhood stance in its ongoing international diplomatic campaign. Yet, the killings of civilians anywhere – be that 120 schoolchildren and dozens of teachers and parents killed in the US missile strike in Iran, thousands of people killed in Gaza due to Israel's military strikes, or people killed in Bucha –should be seen through a similar global morality prism.

In the case of Bucha, if international morality is applied selectively, the West is seen as promoting the moral and political case for isolating Russia, intensifying sanctions against it, and making a case for sustaining military assistance to Ukraine. Russia sees it as an illustration of Western weaponisation of human rights and international morality to delegitimise Russian power. The enormity of the tragedy is thus lost somewhere between establishing the criminal responsibility for the deaths of innocent civilians and the urge to benefit from the geopolitical exploitation of the tragedy.

What makes the international response doubtful and difficult to reconcile is the contrast between Bucha and Gaza. The killing of civilians in Bucha continues to generate consistent and powerful Western diplomatic response, while the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, including thousands of children, never translated into comparable punitive measures against Israel. Russia has been subjected to unprecedented economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation, whereas Israel continues to enjoy substantial economic, political and institutional relationships with the US and European powers. The question is not whether the civilians of Gaza or Bucha deserved international sympathy or whether Ukraine, Russia or Israel should be held accountable. The real question is why the same moral urgency and political determination is not applied to the suffering of people of Gaza as against those who suffered at Bucha. If international law is universal, then its application cannot depend upon whether the accused happens to be an adversary or an ally of the powerful.

The tragedy of modern international politics is that the dead are not always remembered equally, nor are their deaths judged by the same standards. In Bucha, it seems that civilian suffering is used as a powerful instrument for mobilising the international community against Russia. Whereas in Gaza, a greater scale of civilian destruction has not been able to jolt the global conscience and the US and European community's willingness to hold an ally accountable.

The difference is not in the value of human life, but in the strategic value assigned to the states responsible. When the application of international law becomes conditional upon geopolitical alignment, the rules-based international order loses its most essential foundation – the belief that justice is universal. Does the international system impose different political costs for violations of international law depending on who commits them? And is the application of those costs determined less by the nature of the violation than by whether the accused state is an adversary or an ally of the major powers? A just world cannot afford to leave these questions unanswered.