Maria Zakharova on the second anniversary of the staged Bucha massacre: “A staged provocation”

13:54 02.04.2024 •

Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s (photo) comment on the occasion of the second anniversary of the staged Bucha massacre:

“April 3 marks two years since the Zelensky regime and its Western handlers staged a bloody mass murder of the people in the town of Bucha, Kiev Region, allegedly by Russian servicemen, which turned out to be a botched job. However, following the guidelines provided to them and failing to even make an attempt to double-check the facts and establish the actual state of affairs, Western politicians and the media scrambled to spread this falsehood.

This provocation was a put-up job and a staged provocation which was clear from the onset. The Russian side has refuted these allegations many times. We will now refute them once again. During the time the Russian Armed Forces were in Bucha until March 30, 2022, its residents moved freely around the town and used mobile phones and the internet. There were no complaints about the Russian servicemen’s actions during that period, which was publicly confirmed by the mayor of the town, Anatoly Fedoruk, the day after our units left that town. Moreover, during the time they were in Bucha, Russian servicemen brought 452 tonnes of humanitarian aid for the people in the Kiev Region’s towns and villages.

The first footage showing bodies strewn across the town appeared only after the Ukrainian armed forces and foreign journalists entered the town. Importantly, these were not criminalists or forensic experts, but biased media members, whose role was to tell the public a fabricated story and not to ask unnecessary questions.

The first findings of the forensic examination of the bodies found in Bucha, which were published in the British The Guardian on April 24, 2022, showed that most of the civilians died as a result of artillery shelling from fragments of anti-personnel 122-mm shells, which fit the D-30 howitzers in service of the Ukrainian forces, which confirms the fact that these people were killed not by bullets from small arms allegedly used by Russian servicemen, but as a result of the Ukrainian army’s artillery strikes targeting Bucha.

The propaganda-driven disinformation campaign in Bucha came as a response to our goodwill gesture to withdraw troops from the Kiev and Chernigov regions which was made in the wake of progress at the Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul on March 28, 2022. Clearly, the goal of this campaign was to disrupt the dialogue between the parties and to launch a package of pre-arranged Western sanctions on Russia at the behest of London.

Subsequently, Kiev held multiple events inspired by the “Bucha massacre” in order to distract the international community’s attention from its own crimes and inconsistencies of the provocation it had staged, and to spread the fake theory about the town residents allegedly killed by the Russian military among the public in Western countries. This year, the Kiev officials’ attempts to make a big event out of this anniversary have an extra goal of preventing the international community from focusing on the challenging situation in Ukraine and on the line of contact.

Multiple requests that Russia sent to international organisations, including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, to establish the circumstances of the incident and to provide an accurate list of the persons whose bodies were found on the streets of Bucha, as well as other information, remain unanswered. This shows that the organisers of this heinous act have things to hide.

Once again, we demand that international agencies stop covering up for the Kiev regime and ensure a thorough investigation that will finally reveal the names of the victims, the time and the cause of their death, the signs of the bodies having been moved from one place to another, and the individuals responsible for this terrifying crime by the Kiev authorities.”

 

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