MOSCOW, April 6. /TASS/. The collective global hype, including on US Internet platforms, was trotted out over Bucha, Ukraine, where a criminal provocation occurred, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told the Sputnik radio station on Wednesday.

"All of the international mainstream’s energies, including US web platforms <...> were used to spin stories related to the town of Bucha and that criminal provocation that was implemented there," she said.

The diplomat emphasized that the Bucha episode had gone far beyond all boundaries since it was done intentionally. According to her, such actions were committed "not in the heat of passion" but were premeditated. "These are not simply pictures, not just photographs - these are the photographs depicting people who really died. How they turned up on these streets, who killed them, how it turned out that after this, the town’s leadership and its residents who own mobile phones and have the means of direct communication with people from other cities and countries, for several days were saying that their lives were carrying on as usual - how after this all of this happened and who did it - this, of course, demands the most serious answer. Because we’ve seen many scary things from the Ukrainian Army, the Security Service of Ukraine, national battalions, and [their] death squads," the spokeswoman added.

Additionally, the diplomat noted that she didn’t separate this provocation from "the information support of American and Western media machines." The Bucha episode is a criminal act which, according to her, was committed not only by those who killed the residents but also by the string-pullers in the West using their information tools.

On April 3, the Russian Defense Ministry refuted the Kiev regime’s accusations of an alleged massacre of civilians in Bucha. The military agency said that the Russian Armed Forces had left Bucha on March 30, while "the evidence of crimes" emerged only four days later, after Ukrainian Security Service officers had entered the town. The ministry stressed that on March 31, the town’s Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk confirmed in a video address that there were no Russian troops in Bucha. However, he did not say a word about the civilians shot dead in the street with their hands tied behind their backs. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov castigated the episode in Bucha as a "fake attack".