Organizers of Kiev’s crimes against Donbass residents to face tribunal

The organizers and patrons of the Kiev regime’s crimes against civilians in Donbass will be brought to justice and the initiators of information attacks on Russia will be held accountable for slander, the Russian foreign ministry said on Friday, commenting on the New York Times’ unverified reports about the developments in Bucha.

"The initiators of such information attacks should understand that sooner or later they will have to answer for slander," the ministry said. "And the organizers and patrons of the Kiev regime, along with those who are killing civilians in Donbass and shooting at unarmed Russian prisoners will face a tribunal in Donetsk and Lugansk. Punishment is inevitable."

The ministry stressed that it considers the article about the developments in Bucha, which has recently been published in the New York Times, "as an attempt to keep the fabricated version afloat, reinforcing the speculations and accusations thrown in by the regime in Kiev back in the spring."

According to the ministry, the video illustrating the article "is obviously fabricated and has nothing which could back the accusations against the Russian military circulated in the West at the behest of its Ukrainian ‘clients.’"

"It is a high-quality propaganda product built on quite credible videos, which underwent sophisticated manipulation and were commented on in a way to stir up an emotional response," the ministry said.

The ministry noted that speculations about the causes of death of some individuals were based on the journalists’ own assumptions. "For instance, the video features Russian soldiers shooting in an unknown direction while the news analyst says that this was when they had allegedly killed a man whose body was found just within shooting distance from the site," the ministry explained. "The reliability of the sources and the data used by the authors is also dubious."

A special meeting of the United Nations Security Council was initiated by Russia on April 5, 2022, where most of its participants spoke in favor of an independent international investigation of the Bucha developments. "Evidently, there can be no objective investigation in the West - those ‘responsible’ were named immediately and the propaganda machine is printing bogus stories to back it, caring little about the reliability of details," the ministry added.