Kyiv and the West say there is evidence – including images and testimonies of witnesses collected by Reuters and other media outlets – that Russia committed war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bukha. Moscow denies the allegations, calling them “monstrous forgery.” Lavrov said, without providing evidence, that Moscow believed the allegations had a timeline to disrupt the negotiation process after what he described as progress when representatives of Ukraine and Russia met in Turkey last week. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register “We tend to believe that the reason is the desire to find a pretext to interrupt the ongoing negotiations,” he said in a video released by the Russian Foreign Ministry. In a sign of the remaining rift between the two sides after nearly six weeks of war, Lavrov said Moscow was still insisting on demilitarizing and “demilitarizing” Ukraine and protecting Russian-speaking people there, but Kyiv denied that these were real problems. . Ukraine and Western governments say these demands, made by President Vladimir Putin at the start of the Russian invasion, were false pretexts for an illegal attack on a democracy. Lavrov said, again without elaborating, that Ukraine “tried to completely suspend the negotiation process” after the publication of war crimes allegations by the Western media. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Report by Mark Trevelyan. Editing by Howard Goller Our role models: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
