Atlantic Council's charges over Aleppo refuted as false long ago — Defense Ministry

MOSCOW, February 14. /TASS/. All charges against Russia over Aleppo found in the report of the US center called Atlantic Council contain nothing new, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Tuesday.

"We’ve closely studied the Atlantic Council’s report devoted to the Syrian army’s operation to retake Aleppo to find nothing new. All of the charges and propaganda fakes mentioned there have long been dismissed. Moreover, they were dismissed twice - by facts presented at our briefings and by real life - testimonies and interviews by the thousands who have been able to get back to peaceful life in eastern Aleppo," Konashenkov said.

"One has an impression that the report is a compilation of depositions by Bellingcat, Aleppo Media Center, Syrian American Medical Society, the White Helmets and other ostensible ‘activists’, ‘human rights campaigners’, and ‘volunteers’, whom Russian officers from the reconciliation center took out of eastern Aleppo by bus and let leave for good to head for Idlib, for Jabhat al-Nusra," Konashenkov said.

He also remarked that the report kept quiet about mined school buildings, ammunitions depots and fire emplacements in the buildings of hospitals that had been closed down, militants’ warehouses brimming with foods and medicines and mass graves of civilians killed with shots in the head."

"Not a single word is said there about what the real residents of eastern Aleppo have been left with after these ‘White Helmet clowns’ have left for Idlib. There is no mention of what real Russian and Western journalists [not some anonymous activists], who have personally visited eastern Aleppo managed to catch on camera," Konashenkov said.