PolitiFact | Russian officials pushed false claims that a video showed crisis actors playing the role of dead Ukrainians.
Ukrainian officials accused Russia of a massacre in a city outside of Kyiv, claiming they found hundreds of dead people after Russian forces withdrew from the area.
“This is genocide,” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CBS News.
The Russian Ministry of Defense denied responsibility as it has with previous attacks, saying in a post on Telegram that the photographs and videos coming out of Bucha, Ukraine, “are another hoax, a staged production and provocation by the Kiev regime for the Western media.”
Across Telegram, Twitter and other platforms, Russian officials pushing that claim shared a video showing footage taken from a car as it steered through a street strewn with bodies.
A Telegram post shared by the Russian Ministry of Defense, and reshared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, falsely claimed that a video from Ukraine’s Expreso TV showed abnormalities that proved the people were “deliberately laid out to create a more dramatic picture.” (The videos contain sensitive and graphic content.)
“The video of the bodies is confusing,” the Russian defense ministry wrote in the post, which included a slowed-down version of the video. “Here at the 12th second the ‘corpse’ on the right is moving his arm. At 30th second in the rearview mirror the ‘corpse’ sits down.”
Other Russian agencies and officials shared the allegations against Ukraine across...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...