Reporting the news as fake or spreading false reports to confuse and undermine its opponents is a tactic that Moscow has been using for years and has perfected with the advent of social media in places like Syria. In detailed broadcasts to millions of viewers, correspondents and hosts of Russian state television channels said on Tuesday that some photos and videos of the killings were fake, while others showed that the Ukrainians were responsible for the bloodshed. “Among the first to appear were these Ukrainian shots, which show how a lifeless body suddenly shakes its hand,” a report on Russia-1’s evening news program said Monday. “And in the mirror it is clear that the dead still seem to be getting up.” But satellite images from early March show the dead left on the streets of Bucha for weeks. On April 2, a video taken from a moving car was posted online by a Ukrainian lawyer showing the same corpses scattered along Yablonska Street in Bucha. Bucha’s high-resolution satellite imagery from commercial provider Maxar Technology reviewed by the Associated Press corresponded independently to the location of the bodies with separate videos from the scene. Other Western media outlets have had similar reports. Over the weekend, AP reporters saw the bodies of dozens of people in Bucha, many of them shot at close range and some with their hands tied behind their backs. At least 13 bodies were found in and around a building that residents said was used as a base for Russian troops before retreating last week. However, Russian officials and the state media continued to promote their own narrative, parroting it in the newspapers and on radio and television. A top news item on the website of a popular pro-Kremlin newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, captured the mass killings in Ukraine, with a story claiming that “another indisputable proof that the ‘Bucha genocide’ was carried out by Ukrainian forces.” An opinion column published Tuesday by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency suggested that Bucha’s assassination was a ploy by the West to impose tougher sanctions on Russia. Analysts say this is not the first time in six weeks that the Kremlin has used such an information warfare strategy to deny any wrongdoing and to spread misinformation in a coordinated campaign around the world. “This is exactly what Russia is doing every time it acknowledges that it has committed backwardness in public relations by committing atrocities,” said Keir Giles, senior adviser on the Russia-Eurasia program at the think tank Chatham House. “So the system works almost on autopilot.” Prior to the war, Russia denied US intelligence reports detailing its plans to attack Ukraine. Last month, Russian officials sought to discredit photos and reports of the AP’s bombing of a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which left a pregnant woman and her unborn child dead. Photos and videos from Bucha have sparked a new wave of global condemnation and disgust. After appearing in a video Tuesday at the UN Security Council, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy listed the killings in Bucha by Russian troops and showed a graphic video of charred and decomposed corpses there and in other cities. Russian UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia dismissed them as directed. On social media, a choir with more than a dozen official Russian Twitter and Telegram accounts, as well as state-backed Facebook pages, echoed the Kremlin line that the images and videos of the dead were directed or farce. The allegations were made in English, Spanish and Arabic in the accounts of Russian officials or by Russian-backed Sputnik and RT news agencies. The Spanish-language RT en Español has sent more than a dozen posts to its 18 million followers. “Russia denies allegations of civilian killings in Bukha, near Kyiv,” RT en Español reported on Sunday. Several of the same reports sought to discredit allegations that Russian troops carried out the killings by showing a video of Bucha Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk taken on March 31, in which he spoke of the liberation of the suburb from Russian occupation. “It confirms that the Russian troops have left Bukha. “There are no reports of corpses on the streets,” top Russian official Mikhail Ulyanov wrote on Twitter on Monday. But Fedoruk had publicly commented on the violence before the Russian troops withdrew in an interview with the Italian news agency Adnkronos on March 28, where he accused them of murder and rape in Bucha. In an interview with the AP on March 7, Fedoruk spoke of corpses piling up in Bucha: “We can not even collect the corpses because the heavy artillery bombardment does not stop day or night. Dogs uproot corpses on city streets. It’s a nightmare. “ Satellite images from Maxar Technologies as Russian troops occupy Bukha on March 18 and 19 support Fedoruk’s account of corpses on the streets, showing at least five corpses on a street. Some social media platforms have tried to curb propaganda and misinformation by the Kremlin. Google has blocked RT accounts, while in Europe, RT and Sputnik have been banned by technology company Meta, which has also stopped promoting or boosting Russian state media sites on its platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram. Russia has found ways to avoid repression by publishing in different languages through dozens of official Russian social media accounts. “It’s a pretty huge messaging device controlled by Russia – whether it’s official embassy accounts, bot accounts or toll booths or anti-Western influencers – they have many ways to circumvent platform bans,” said Bret Schafer, head of the intelligence team. in the Alliance. for Securing Democracy, a non-partisan think tank in Washington. __ Associated Press writer Colleen Barry in Milan contributed.
