How alleged atrocities in Bucha compare to previous Putin campaigns

As horrifying images and testimony have emerged from Bucha, the Ukrainian town 35 miles north-west of the capital, Kyiv, it is becoming ever more likely that Vladimir Putin has operated by a strict playbook in the north of Ukraine as with elsewhere in the country that has served him well for decades, albeit at a heavy cost to his army.

Instead, the Russian forces faced heavy resistance, and had to fight hard in Bucha and elsewhere, north and north-east of Kyiv, just to keep the initial ground they had secured. The Russians had reappeared after a few days, residents said, with fatal consequences.

Which led to the brutal corrective moves that Moscow made in both Grozny and is now accused of making in various locations in Ukraine, born out of the belief that brute force through the indiscriminate use of artillery, potentially resulting in the total destruction of a city, will bring a people to its knees.

In Ukraine, Bucha is the latest, but Chernihiv, Mariupol and Kharkiv came before, enduring similar treatment. Firstly, came a communications blackout and the cutting off of the essentials of electricity, gas and water.

What followed was the blanket bombing of civilian targets, alongside the false offer of humanitarian corridors that gave and then cruelly dashed hope.

Infrastructure was demolished, hospitals, bomb shelters and schools targeted.

Assad remains in power. In Chechnya, Putin turned to the son of the chief mufti, Ramzan Kadyrov, who has since provided support for Russian forces in both Syria and Ukraine. Which comes to the final play: the normalisation of the new administrations.

That requires a level of cynicism and weakness from the west that Putin has long believed is a banker: that the US and the EU will draw a blind eye to what has happened given the intractability of the new normal.