Hollywood star George Clooney can prove his good intentions by having his foundation investigate an alleged massacre in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.
Clooney has disavowed comments made by a legal director at his foundation, about working to get Russian journalists arrested in the West. The Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ) would never go after journalists and has “a long track record of protecting” them, the actor insisted.
“We understood both Clooney and his organization very well,” Zakharova replied in a Telegram post, suggesting she was not convinced by the statement. “Therefore, we would like to invite them to engage in real assistance to journalists and obtain a list of the townspeople who ‘died’ in Bucha.”
“Imagine, George, to this day no one knows who exactly the Western media – including CNN and the BBC – showed lying on the streets of Bucha. Publish the list [of their names] and save Western journalists from historical dishonor,” Zakharova said. “That would be priceless. Until then, you have a price tag.”
Bucha, a northern suburb of Kiev, was under control of Russian troops until the the end of March 2022, when they retreated as a “goodwill gesture” to Ukraine as peace talks continued in Istanbul. The Ukrainian government claimed to have found hundreds of dead civilians there on April 1, after Kiev’s forces entered the town, and cited the “massacre” to break off the negotiations.
Russia has repeatedly said the so-called massacre was a false-flag operation intended to smear Moscow and continue the conflict. Senior Ukrainian officials later admitted that the West had pushed Kiev to keep fighting.
The furor over the work of Clooney’s foundation arose after an interview with Anna Neistat, legal director of the CJF’s The Docket project, to the US government-funded outlet Voice of America. The Soviet-born Neistat told VOA that her team was pushing the EU and the International Criminal Court (ICC) to charge Russian journalists with “incitement to genocide” in Ukraine and have them arrested when they travel abroad.
“Someone in our foundation misspoke,” Clooney said in a statement the CJF posted on social media on Monday.
The foundation revealed last month that Clooney’s wife Amal – a Lebanese-British human rights lawyer – was part of an international legal panel that recommended the ICC to levy war crimes charges against Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three leaders of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, in connection to the conflict in Gaza.