Evgeny Biyatov | Sputnik Reuters Russian President Vladimir Putin and his closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, unveiled a new theory on Tuesday as to who was responsible for the killings, rapes and torture of hundreds of civilians in the city of Bucha. occupation by Russian troops. It was not, they insisted, the Russian soldiers who were witnesses, satellite images and forensic evidence all suggest that they went on a rampage of looting and killings for a month. The real culprits, Lukashenko claimed without evidence, were British agents conducting a “psychological special operation” in the green suburb of Kiev. Mr Lukashenko and Mr Putin spoke during a carefully crafted press conference at a space launch site in Vostochny, Russia. It was Putin’s first public appearance outside Moscow since Russia launched its brutal invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Mr Lukashenko said he and Mr Putin had discussed in detail “the British-led psychological operation in Bucha”. The Belarusian dictator then told reporters that the Russian Federal Security Service would provide them with material to support his seemingly absurd claim. “If you need addresses, passports, license numbers and trademarks, the date they arrived in Bucha and how they did it, then the FSB can provide these materials,” Lukashenko was quoted as saying by NBC. Putin said Lukashenko had given him “papers” for the assassination of Bucha, which he gave to the FSB. “How, who came to this settlement and created conditions to organize this challenge and fake, the FSB has relevant interceptions,” he told reporters. The British embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Lukashenko’s allegations. Putin has said in the past that the deaths in Bucha were “fake” and the Kremlin insists that the hundreds of bodies found were directed there. But Tuesday appeared to be the first time Belarus and Russian security services had helped promote Britain’s secret power behind the plot. Russian troops have taken control of several cities, including Bucha in northern Ukraine, in the first weeks of a failed attempt to seize the capital, Kyiv. When it became clear that the Kremlin could not occupy the city, the Russian troops withdrew, leaving a trail of slaughter and destruction in their path. In Bucha alone, more than 400 civilians were found dead after the Russians withdrew, many of them with signs of execution, rape and torture. Almost overnight, an international consortium to document alleged war crimes gathered and more than a dozen countries are assisting in the process. Speaking in Vostochny, Putin used both taboo and misinformation to try to divert attention from the atrocities of Russian soldiers. At one point, he complained that NATO had also caused civilian deaths in the battle, suggesting that the West’s anger in Russia over the civilian deaths in Bucha was hypocritical. He then compared Buha to cities in Syria where Russian-backed President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons during a 2013 civil war and later accused the rebels of gassing their supporters to side with Assad. As Putin and Lukashenko plotted to try to explain the atrocities in Syria, the international community this week stepped up its resolve as more evidence of possible war crimes was leaked by Russian troops. Hours after the Putin-Lukashenko meeting and their bizarre allegations about British agents, President Joe Biden said that these same elements sounded worse than individual war crimes – they looked like genocide. “I called it genocide because it has become increasingly clear that Putin is simply trying to eliminate the idea that he might even be Ukrainian,” Biden said late Tuesday night. “The evidence is growing. It looks different from last week. More evidence is coming out literally about the horrible things the Russians have done in Ukraine,” he said.
