MOSCOW, September 17. /TASS/. Ukrainian authorities are attempting to pass off Ukrainian soldiers killed in action in the Kharkov Region as victims of alleged repressions by Russia, member of the Russian Civic Chamber Alexander Malkevich told TASS on Friday.
On Thursday, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky recorded a video address in English where he claimed that a mass grave had been allegedly discovered in Izyum. On Friday, the representatives of foreign media outlets were brought there. According to Malkevich, this was necessary in order to promote this issue in the foreign press and accuse Russia of mass slaughter.
"We are being shown multiple graves, they begin to dig them up, show the bodies. Actually, Russian troops and frequently the officials from military-civilian administrations were burying those killed Ukrainian soldiers that were abandoned on a battlefield by their so-called comrades. Now they are being passed off as the victims of Russian repressions while actually those are the Ukrainians whom their so-called comrades-in-arms didn’t care about," he said.
The official noted that Kiev was not interested as to what would happen to the bodies of killed Ukrainian troops. "The same is happening on the border of the Kherson and Nikolayev Regions where endless staged attacks are underway for the sake of promoting Zelensky. We know that [head of the Nikolayev regional state administration Vitaly] Kim refuses to take the bodies of those killed. That is, essentially, in any location where the Ukrainian Army is sacrificing its soldiers by dozens and hundreds, it is possible to set up many of such Bucha-like staged events following a known technology," he noted.
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.".