You're doing your research about individual on-the-ground incidents in Ukraine, and that's a good thing. Keep doing it. Getting back to the sources, or as close as possible in an armed conflict in which truth is often the first casualty, is important. You are correct that "there is propaganda on all sides," but some of it is worse than others.

There are reasons why Russia is criminalizing normal reporting by mainstream media on its own territory. Ukraine doesn't have clean hands in the propaganda war either, but they're not (at least not yet) passing laws to turn on-the-ground reporters into criminals. Of course it's not in their best interests right now to do that, but the Ukrainians are banning pro-Russian political parties and doing other things to criminalize dissent that we haven't seen in the West since World War II.

I do not claim to be a military expert, either, but I am a reporter working outside the home of the US Army's engineer, chemical, and military police schools. Nearly all of my work involves civilian news coverage, but not all.

One of the former commanding generals of our local Army installation, who later went on to become the Army's inspector general, is the man who earlier in his Military Police career had to clean up the mess at Abu Ghraib after the "funny pictures" to which you refer. I can assure you that his view of such actions, which were being done by relatively low-level troops, mostly from a National Guard unit who were actively working to hide their actions from more senior people who were active duty regular Army personnel, was severe.

Bad things happen in war for many reasons. Some are mistakes -- an obvious example is that wrong information can lead to civilian targets being struck when they should not have been, or "smart" missiles can go off course and hit unintended targets. But others are deliberate.

What I meant by "different methods of determining what is an off-limits target" is that the Russians for a very long time, not only now but in prior conflicts, have not respected the Geneva Conventions and their bans on deliberately targeting civilians. We saw that in their own war in Afghanistan. We saw that in their fight against Germany and its allies in World War II, though to be fair, the actual Nazis were quite horrific in their treatment of the Russians and the Russians responded in kind.

When mass rapes become a deliberate tactic of war, as was the case with the Russians during World War II, we're not dealing with the same views of what is and is not acceptable in wartime.

There are reasons why Germans during World War II did everything possible to surrender to Americans (or their allies) rather than the Russians. That's a matter of historical fact and not in dispute. Yes, we did bad things during World War II and both earlier and later conflicts, but in most if not all cases, those things were **NOT** American policy, were done by individual soldiers or small units, and were punished when discovered.

My Lai (and yes, I know there are different spellings, including Mai Lai) was an aberration, not policy.

I've covered enough court martials and civilian trials of soldiers for off-post crimes to know that military personnel can do awful things. But they are the exception, not policy, in American and most of our other Western allied military forces. That simply wasn't the way the former Soviet Union worked, it's not the way the Russians work, and to be fair, it's not the way the Ukrainian military was trained, historically speaking. I hope the Ukrainians are better today, if only to keep Western support, than they were in the not-so-distant past as part of the Soviet military.