MOSCOW, September 22. /TASS/. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is making clearly confusing statements regarding the Bucha events, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday.

"The departing chief of the UN Secretariat is frankly confused in his statements," Lavrov said while speaking at the 'Dialogue about Fakes 4.0' international forum. "He stated at some point that there was information at hand about the victims and their real names, but it was confidential and subject to certain internal rules of the Secretariat - no one has ever shown us these rules."

"He later said that they had no such information and then at another point he claimed that the relatives of the deceased were against disclosing this information, while no one knows the names of the relatives either. This is a truly striking fact," Russia’s top diplomat noted.

Lavrov stressed that Moscow "had already realized that it should not depend on the UN Secretariat’s assistance."

On March 30, 2022, Russia, as a sign of goodwill amid negotiations with Ukraine in Istanbul, withdrew from the area around Kiev, including from the town of Bucha. On March 31, this was confirmed on camera by the head of the local administration. A few days later, Western television broadcast footage showing - in contrast to an earlier recording - that the bodies of people who had allegedly been murdered were lying in the streets. In Russia, a criminal case was opened over the provocation involving the spread of deliberately false information about the Russian Armed Forces.

The Dialogue about Fakes 4.0 forum is a global platform for discussing methods to combat disinformation and develop fact-checking technologies. The event is taking place at the Russia National Center with the participation of over 2,000 journalists, experts and businesspeople from 80 countries. It is organized by the Global Fact-Checking Network (GFCN), established in 2025 by the TASS news agency, the autonomous nonprofit organization "Dialogue Regions," and the New Media Workshop.

TASS is the forum’s strategic media partner.