Asked on Dec. 10 by a legislator in the Federation Council about the efforts to counter Western media Russophobia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov provided a succinct account of the keystone “Bucha” narrative’s role in destroying the March 2022 peace negotiations between Kiev and Moscow:
“We must also fight for factual information at the diplomatic level, as in the case of the Bucha massacre, which everyone is talking about.
“You remember how it was. President Vladimir Putin has recently recalled it. The Ukrainians themselves proposed the underlying principle of a peace agreement. But the then Prime Minister of Great Britain, Boris Johnson, personally prohibited them from signing it—it was in early April 2022, when there was still hope of doing that. Acting at the request of our Western colleagues, we retreated from the suburbs of Kiev, including Bucha, in a gesture of goodwill. Nobody there provided any negative facts for two days after that. The mayor of Bucha went on screen, speaking about returning to their native town. And then, BBC journalists unexpectedly arrived in the town and started filming dead bodies—not somewhere in basements, but on the main street, where they allegedly lay for three days. Nobody saw these bodies before the BBC came to the town. This caused a new wave of sanctions and allegations of our atrocities.
“We have been fighting for the truth and justice for nearly four years. I have mentioned this issue several times during meetings with my colleagues at the UN Security Council. I looked UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in the eye, requesting at least an accurate list of the persons whose bodies were shown by the BBC, the only media outlet to unexpectedly turn up in Bucha that day. No reply.
“We sent an official letter to the UN Secretary-General, to the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and to the Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine established by the High Commissioner. No reply.”
“When we asked the press secretary of Antonio Guterres about it, he replied that they did their utmost to protect human rights and transparency, but they sometimes cannot disclose information because this could endanger lives. This is ridiculous.”
Lavrov told the legislators that there was some hope in working with “the Western media outlets who have some conscience left. There are such outlets. We must work with them accurately, providing facts, and let them make their own conclusions. Some media are ready to draw correct and honest conclusions from these facts.”
EIR News has been at the forefront of this, and a lot more.
