Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech as he visits the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur region, Russia April 12, 2022.
Yevgeny Biyatov | Sputnik | Reuters
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, on Tuesday unveiled a new theory about who was responsible for the murders, rapes and torture of hundreds of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, while the city was occupied by Russian forces was.
They insisted the Russian soldiers, which witnesses, satellite imagery and forensic evidence all suggest, did not go on a months-long rampage of looting and killing.
The real culprits, Lukashenko claimed without evidence, were British agents who carried out a “special psychological operation” in the leafy Kyiv suburb.
Lukashenko and Putin spoke during a carefully orchestrated press conference at a space launch facility in Vostochny, in Russia’s Far East. It was Putin’s first public appearance outside of Moscow since Russia launched its brutal invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
Lukashenko said he and Putin had spoken at length about “the special psychological operation carried out by the British in Bucha”.
The Belarusian autocrat then told reporters that Russia’s Federal Security Bureau would provide them with materials to back up his seemingly absurd claim.
“If you need addresses, passports, license numbers and stamps, what date they arrived in Bucha and how they did it, the FSB can provide these materials,” Lukashenko said, according to an NBC translation of his remarks.
Putin said Lukashenko gave him “papers” about the Bucha killings, which he gave to the FSB.
“Like who came to this agreement and created conditions to organize this provocation and falsification, the FSB has relevant wiretaps,” he told reporters.
The British Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Lukashenko’s allegations on Tuesday.
Putin has previously said the deaths in Bucha were “fake” and the Kremlin insists the hundreds of bodies discovered there were staged.
But Tuesday appeared to be the first time Belarus and the Russian security services have both helped promote claims that Britain was the secret power behind the plot.
Russian troops took control of numerous cities, including Bucha in northern Ukraine, in the first few weeks of their failed push to capture the capital, Kyiv. When it became clear that the Kremlin could not take the city, Russian troops retreated, leaving a trail of carnage and destruction in their wake.
In Bucha alone, more than 400 civilians have been found dead since the Russians left, many with signs of execution, rape and torture. An international consortium for documenting alleged war crimes was formed almost overnight, and more than a dozen countries are supporting the process.
In his Vostochny speech, Putin used both whataboutism and misinformation to try to divert attention from the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers.
At one point he complained that NATO had also caused civilian deaths in combat, and suggested that Western outrage at Russia over the civilian deaths in Bucha was hypocritical.
He then compared Bucha to cities in Syria where Russian-backed President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons during a civil war in 2013, and later accused rebels of gassing their own supporters to frame Assad.
As Putin and Lukashenko hatch elaborate conspiracies to try to explain away atrocities emanating from Syria, the international community reiterated its resolve this week as mounting evidence of likely war crimes by Russian forces emerged.
Hours after Putin and Lukashenko met and made their bizarre claims about British agents, President Joe Biden said the same evidence looked to him like something worse than isolated war crimes — it looked like genocide.
“I called it genocide because it’s becoming increasingly clear that Putin is just trying to erase the idea of being Ukrainian at all,” Biden said late Tuesday night.
“The evidence is piling up. It looks different than last week. There is literally more evidence coming out of the horrific things that the Russians did in Ukraine,” he said.