On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called on the Ukrainian authorities to “discover civilian bodies in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv, after the withdrawal of forces from Moscow.”
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During an interview with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Mr. Putin made special reference to “the rude and cynical provocation of the Kyiv regime in the city of Buca,” according to a Kremlin press release.
This is the first reaction of the Russian president to this issue, which is causing international outrage.
Before Mr. Putin, other Russian officials denied any violation by Moscow’s forces in Bucha, and the Kremlin described photos of corpses scattered in the streets of this city as “fakes” and published by the media since last weekend.
On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for Russian diplomacy, Maria Zakharova, accused Western officials and media of “issuing judgment + condemnation + against our country (…) without trying to verify anything.”
She added that “this criminal fraud was invented to justify the next set of sanctions” against Moscow, and sentenced the “accomplices” of the Western media in Bocce’s abuses.
According to her, the Ukrainian side either executed civilians in this city or transported the bodies there for staging purposes.
On Wednesday, the German government assessed that the Russian thesis about organizing the Ukrainian corpses in Bucha was “indefensible” in light of broadcast satellite images.
German government spokesman Stephen Hebestreet said in Berlin that these images show in particular that the victims discovered by the media last weekend had been lying there since at least March 10 “while Russian forces were in this area.
The Russian army accused Ukraine of implementing similar scenarios in several other regions from which Russian forces withdrew.
Russia launched a military attack on Ukraine since February 24. In response to this intervention, Western countries imposed severe economic sanctions on Moscow.