The UN is ignoring repeated requests by Moscow to provide the names of civilians allegedly killed in a “massacre” in the Kiev suburb of Bucha, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Moscow has rejected Western and Ukrainian allegations that Russian forces carried out killings in the area in 2022.
The alleged massacre in Bucha made international headlines in April 2022 when Ukrainian forces claimed to have found the bodies of hundreds of people in a suburb of Kiev, shortly after Russian troops left the area as part of a “goodwill gesture” by Moscow amid peace talks with Kiev.
Ukraine immediately blamed the deaths on Russia and subsequently used the incident as one of the main reasons for its withdrawal from the peace negotiations. Moscow has repeatedly said the so-called massacre was a false-flag operation intended to tarnish its image and derail the diplomatic process.
At the time, a BBC journalist showed “dozens of bodies lying on the central street, and later Russia was accused of killing civilians” and “committing war crimes,” Lavrov recalled during an embassy roundtable on the Ukraine conflict, held in Moscow on Friday.
“Today, we do not have any answer to our question. We want to have a name-list of individuals whose bodies were found by the BBC journalist,” Lavrov stressed.
The Russian foreign minister said he had appealed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres three times to provide the relevant lists, “but there is just silence in response.”
Earlier this week, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused Ukrainian forces of executing civilians in a Donbass town as part of a “false flag” operation designed to wrongly frame Moscow for war crimes.
According to the ministry, witnesses claimed that mercenaries, including alleged Polish nationals, carried out dozens of killings in Selidovo in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic before retreating in the face of advancing Russian troops in late October.
“When the West started talking about peace negotiations, [Ukrainian leader Vladimir] Zelensky began preparing ‘Bucha 2’, but in Selidovo,” Rodion Miroshnik, a senior foreign ministry official tasked with gathering evidence of Ukrainian war crimes, stated.