Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted that Russia has “suffered significant losses” in its ongoing war in Ukraine, but denied that Moscow has carried out “war crimes” in Kiev.
“We have suffered significant losses of troops. This is a great tragedy for us,” Peskov told Sky News on Thursday without giving an exact number of the Russian casualties.
“Our military are doing their best to bring an end to that operation. And we do hope that in coming days, in the foreseeable future, this operation will reach its goals or will finish it by the negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian delegation,” he said while referring to the ongoing war as “operation”.
Regarding the pictures and videos of dead bodies lining the streets across cities in Ukraine, he told Sky News that they were a “bold fake” and “we’re living in days of fakes and lies”.
“We deny the Russian military can have something in common with these atrocities and that dead bodies were shown on the streets of Bucha,” the spokesman was quoted as saying.
He stressed that the whole situation in Bucha, where photos of dead civilians have triggered global condemnation, was a “well-staged insinuation, nothing else”.
Earlier, the Russian Defence Ministry made a similar claim that the photos and videos published of the carnage in Bucha had been faked by the Ukrainian government.
The Kremlin spokesman went on to say that Russian troops retreated from Ukraine’s Kiev and Chernihiv regionsas an act of “goodwill” following weeks of heavy shelling.
“It was a goodwill act to lift tension from those regions and show Russia is really ready to create comfortable conditions to continue negotiations,” he told Sky News.
Peskov also said that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not appear in any war crimes court, adding: “We don’t see any possibility for that, we don’t consider it to be realistic.”