Maxar Technologies provided Reuters with nine photos of Bucha on March 18, 19 and 31. At least four of the images appear to show corpses on one of the city’s streets, Yablonska Street. The city was occupied by Russian forces until about March 30.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the bodies had been “directed” and that their images and Ukrainian version of events had been circulated on social media by Western countries and Ukraine.
Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, has said that Moscow will present “empirical evidence” to the Security Council that its forces did not kill civilians in Ukraine and did not take part in the events in Bukhara.
The Security Council will meet later on Tuesday.
The New York Times, which was given a separate set of images from Bucha by Maxar, analyzed the photos in a story published on April 4, comparing them to a street-level video showing the same scenes and confirming the locations. of bodies. His analysis, he said, confirmed the accuracy of the satellite images.
“High-resolution Maxar satellite images collected over Ukraine’s Bucha (northwest of Kiev) verify and confirm recent social media videos and photos revealing corpses on the streets and left open for weeks,” Maxar told an e-mail. mail. to Reuters, which also included an analysis of the images.
Ukrainian authorities have accused Russian forces of carrying out a “massacre” in Bukha and say 300 people were killed there during a month-long occupation. Ukrainian troops recaptured the city last week.
Jeffrey Lewis, a satellite imager who has seen Maxar’s images, described the process of inferring what the images mean as “very simple”.
“You see images on the ground that show corpses in relation to cars and buildings, and in satellite images, you can see the pieces on the ground in the same place next to the same cars and buildings.
“What the satellite images show is that the bodies were present while the Russians were in control of the area,” said Lewis, who is director of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Program in East Asia at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
This image is part of a time series of satellite images from Maxar that focus on Yablonska Street in Bucha. Image views are related to the video path that appears on social media, which is mentioned in the article (Satellite Image © 2022 Maxar Technologies)
This image is also of Yablonska Street in Bucha, but it rotates. (Satellite Image © 2022 Maxar Technologies)
The Pentagon said Monday it could not independently confirm the horror accounts, but had no reason to dispute them.
A Reuters reporter saw several dead people in the city, including one with his hands tied behind his back. Residents in the area said hundreds of civilians had been killed.
Bucha Deputy Mayor Taras Shapravskyi said 50 of the dead, found after Russian forces withdrew from the city late last week, were victims of extrajudicial killings by Russian troops. Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, have accused Moscow of war crimes.
“These are war crimes and will be recognized by the world as genocide,” Zelenski said, speaking on television from Bucha, wearing armor and surrounded by military personnel.
The deaths in Bucha, outside Kyiv, have led to commitments for further sanctions against Moscow by the West, which may include some restrictions on the billions of dollars in energy that Europe continues to import from Russia.
President Joe Biden has blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes and called for a war crimes trial.
(Report by Gerry Doyle · Edited by Raju Gopalakrishnan)