'Preposterous!' U.S. Hits Back At Lavrov’s Lies On Bucha

The State Department on Thursday strongly hit back at Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov's latest accusations of the West in what he'd described as the "staging of [Russian war crimes in] Bucha," TURAN's Washington correspondent reports.

"The notion that the West would stage things like Russian shelling on – the West would stage the sheer amount of civilian destruction that the Russian Federation has unleashed on Ukraine is just preposterous," Principal Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel told a daily briefing when responding to TURAN's questions.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2022 documented the unlawful killings, including summary executions, of dozens of civilians in Bucha. Photographic and video evidence of the massacre emerged on 1 April 2022 after Russian forces withdrew from the city.

Lavrov early this week took the podium at the U.N. to describe the war crimes in Bucha as "staged by the West."

The U.S. last year sanctioned Russian officers who committed war crimes in Bucha, Andriivka.