Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday that while dialogue with Russia is the only way to end the 41-day war, a direct conversation between him and Vladimir Putin may be out of the question. cogitation.
During an interview with Ukrainian journalists, Zelensky again cited what he called the “genocide” in Butcha as an obstacle to peace talks. On a visit to the city where hundreds of bodies were found on the streets and in mass graves after the withdrawal of Russian troops, the Ukrainian president had already said that it was “difficult to talk” after seeing the massacre scene.
“All of us, myself included, will even perceive the possibility of negotiations as a challenge,” Zelensky said. “The challenge is internal, first of all, the human challenge itself. So when you pull yourself together and you have to do that, I don’t think we have any other choice.”
After writing Butcha’s events as “unforgivable”, however, Zelensky said Ukraine and Russia must make the difficult decision to proceed with negotiations, but signaled that progress in this direction will only be made if Moscow recognizes what its troops have done.
Such a possible admission by Russia is highly unlikely. Since images of the corpses in Butcha began circulating on Saturday, Moscow has blamed “Ukrainian radicals”, called the disclosure “provocation” and reinforced its speech that it did not deliberately target civilians.
Russian diplomacy also said it would forward empirical evidence to the United Nations Security Council to prove “the farce of Kiev and its sponsors in the West”.
On Tuesday, Moscow made new attacks on what it calls “fake news” from Ukraine. “These are fakes matured in the cynical imagination of Ukrainian propaganda,” Dmitri Medvedev, former president and current deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, said on the Telegram.
He said Kiev had received large amounts of money from Western public relations firms and non-governmental organizations to try to frame Moscow.
“To dehumanize Russia and for its maximum defamation, the frenzied beasts of national battalions and territorial defense units are prepared to kill even their own civilians,” Medvedev said, without providing evidence of the claims.
In a statement, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had evidence that Ukraine’s Center for Psychological Operations “staged a footage of civilians allegedly killed by the violent actions of the Russian Armed Forces”. The evidence, however, was not disclosed or detailed.
One of the Kremlin’s arguments is based on the fact that Russian forces withdrew from Butcha on March 30. The mayor declared the city free of invaders the next day, but the bodies of civilians were not shown until the last weekend. According to Moscow, the corpses shown in some images did not show characteristic signs of the degradation they would have suffered after being exposed for several days.
An independent analysis by the American newspaper The New York Times based on satellite images from the company Maxar, however, shows that at least 11 of the bodies were already on the streets of Butcha during the Russian occupation.
The report compared a video posted by a Ukrainian last Saturday on Yablonska Street with satellite photos from March 11 — objects compatible with the size of a person could be seen in the same places where the video showed bodies. That is, the victims would have been exposed on the streets for more than three weeks.
Another analysis, comparing a video with satellite images captured between the 20th and 21st, identified three bodies next to a bicycle and an abandoned car.
