He did not answer the question of how the incident should be investigated, but Moscow’s desire to discuss this issue in the UN Security Council “speaks that Russia wants and requires consideration at the international level.”
Peskov also refused to make predictions about how what happened could affect the ongoing negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. “We are not commenting on this yet. I do not have information about the schedule for the continuation of negotiations,” the Kremlin spokesman said.
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Peskov also said that he had not seen the world media reports from Bucha. Responding to the words of a journalist that the international media “showed their own pictures” from Bucha, Peskov said: “I don’t know which videos you are talking about. I am not familiar with this reportage.”
Ukrainian authorities and a number of Western media, including Reuters and AFP, released footage from Bucha on April 3 showing corpses. According to Reuters, the photographs were of dead civilians. The city’s mayor Anatoly Fedoruk told AFP that the people depicted were shot dead. He said that another 280 people were buried in mass graves.
The Russian Defense Ministry called the published photos and videos a staging and a provocation and stated that the Russian military was not involved in the killings of civilians. The department recalled that Russian troops left Bucha on March 30, and for the entire time that the city was controlled by them, “not a single local resident was injured.” The Ministry of Defense stated that “evidence of crimes in Bucha” appeared only on the fourth day, when employees of the SBU and Ukrainian television arrived in the city.
Bastrykin instructed to evaluate reports of murders of residents of Bucha
Russia tried to convene a meeting of the UN Security Council on April 4 to discuss the events in Bucha, however, as Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, this initiative was blocked by the UK.
The day before, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for an independent investigation of what happened in Bucha to bring the perpetrators to justice and added that he was “deeply shocked” by images from the city.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky invited former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Bucha to show them “what the policy of concessions to Russia has led to in 14 years.”