MOSCOW, November 5. /TASS/. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has not responded to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s 12 questions about the provocation in Bucha, Kirill Logvinov, Director of the International Organizations Department at the Russian Foreign Ministry, stated in an interview with TASS.

"Regarding the United Nation’s reaction, let me remind you that we have been working with them for several years now. We do so with the utmost transparency - all of our correspondence with the UN Secretariat regarding Bucha is available on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website. I urge you to review it," he said. "In April, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov posed 12 concrete questions to UN Secretary General Guterres regarding the report published in 2022 by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. We have received no answer to any of them."

Among other things, according to Logvinov, Lavrov’s letter "contained a demand to explain why Guterres let such serious accusations against Russia be published, given that his methodology is based on the assertion that there are 'reasonable grounds to believe' that the listed facts took place." "Why, when preparing the report, did UN officials draw on statistics from a single - Ukrainian - source, and one that is particularly inaccessible?" the diplomat asked. "There is also no explanation for the wide scatter of the number of fatalities: the report cites figures ranging from 21 to 1,365 people, meaning a margin of error of more than 1,000 people. These are just a few examples of glaring inconsistencies in the OHCHR’s (Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights - TASS) 'findings' regarding Bucha."

"Guterres’s bias in the context of the Ukrainian crisis has long been known to everyone," the Russian diplomat pointed out. "This explains both the Secretariat’s de facto refusal to cooperate with us in conducting a full-scale investigation into the Bucha hoax and the Secretary General’s own attempts, under numerous and often contradictory pretexts, to sweep this matter under the rug."

He also noted that today it can be said that "the report of the International Public Tribunal, led by its chairman, Grigoryev, a member of the Russian Public Chamber, that was officially presented in New York and, has become the subject of close scrutiny by experts and journalists." Thus, in early October, the Global Fact-Checking Network published a collective journalistic investigation that not only confirmed the report’s findings but also exposed new evidence of falsification.

The diplomat recalled that in October, Lavrov sent a letter to Guterres calling on him to take into account data from Grigoryev’s report, review the controversial calculations by the OHCHR, which in 2022 formed the basis of the West’s defamatory narrative about Bucha, and to initiate a professional dialogue with the Russian side with the aim of establishing the truth. "If you will, for us this is a matter of principle," Logvinov concluded.

On March 30, 2022, the Russian army, as a gesture of goodwill amid negotiations with Ukraine in Istanbul, withdrew from the Kiev area, including the city of Bucha. On March 31, 2022, this was confirmed on camera by the head of the local administration. Several days later, Western media released footage showing - unlike earlier recordings - bodies of people lying on the streets of the city, whose killings were immediately attributed to Russian troops by the West. In Russia, a criminal case was opened over the provocation concerning the dissemination of knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces.