“Russian occupying authorities are offering compensations to those who lost their apartments or loved ones on the condition that they sign documents blaming Zelensky and the Ukrainian Armed Forces for the devastation wrought on the city.”

“In fact, at least since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, blaming the victim has become a signature strategy of Putin’s regime. In the all-but-destroyed Mariupol, the Russian occupying authorities are offering compensations to those who lost their apartments or loved ones on the condition that they sign documents blaming Zelensky and the Ukrainian Armed Forces for the devastation wrought on the city. In Bucha, where Ukrainian civilians were massacred in cold blood by the Russian military, Kremlin claimed that the massacre was staged by “Ukrainian radicals” and that the dead were the victims of Ukrainian shelling of the Kyiv suburb after the Russians had already retreated. After an attack on the train station in Kramatorsk in the beginning of April, “Russia tried to blame Ukraine for attacking its own citizens.”
[…]
The deep-seated psychological roots of the phenomenon are also noteworthy. One of its underlying factors is the “just-world hypothesis,” according to which bad things happen to bad people, who have somehow deserved their fate. Such a hypothesis is ineffective when young children suffer, but, it may be transferred onto the level of collective life, here involving Ukrainians as a nation, which is not recognized as such in Kremlin’s ideological accounts. According to these ideological concoctions, Ukraine flirted with the West, forgot about its organic connection to Russia, and, therefore, brought the current disaster upon itself, meriting the loss of its territorial integrity within internationally recognized borders and even of its independence.
Ultimately, psychologists contend that “people blame victims so that they can continue to feel safe themselves.” If innocent civilians are bombed in their apartments in the middle of the night, if children die in their strollers as a result of a missile attack simply because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, if people waiting for the train that would carry them to relative safety are killed by another missile—if all this happens to someone who did nothing wrong, then I am not safe either, for the same fate may befall me. Going hand in hand with Russia’s strategy of blaming the victim is another, similarly crucial, strategy of making a vast majority of the Russian population feel safe at the expense of the insecurity of others, including those others who are deemed to be internal enemies. Blaming the victim is necessary to keep this illusion of safety, and to prevent Russian empathy toward, and identification with, their Ukrainian neighbors. It adds insult to injury, just as it desensitizes the Russian public to all acts of violence, whether foreign or domestic.”

The Russian Doctrine: Blame the Victim:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/the-russian-doctrine-blame-the-victim/