LONDON, April 8. /TASS/. Mariupol will be liberated from Ukrainian nationalist battalions, and Russia hopes this would happen in the near future, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with Sky News on Thursday.

"Mariupol is going to be liberated from nationalistic battalions and we hope it will happen sooner than later," he said, dismissing Western media reports about the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol as fake news.

Commenting on satellite images from the Bucha, made by Maxar Technologies and published by the US media, Peskov said the company had links to the US Department of Defense and, therefore, there were doubts about how unbiased its attitude was.

"We know pretty well that the company that has supplied the international community with those satellite pictures is Maxar, which is in a very tight cooperation with the Pentagon. <…> They actually have no exact dates on that footage, on their satellite images," the spokesman said, adding that it was impossible to establish the exact date of when those pictures were taken.

The Kremlin spokesman also said he was perplexed by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s stance about the events in Ukraine.

"In our understanding, he is rather not constructive in his attitude. We have never heard any similar rhetoric coming from Boris Johnson during last eight years, when people in Donbass were killed by Ukrainian nationalists, when they were heavily bombarded and shelled by heavy artillery," Peskov said.