Russia has taken its long-running campaign to rewrite the history of the Bucha massacre to the highest level of the United Nations. On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly’s high-level week in New York, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met Secretary-General António Guterres on September 24 and handed him a copy of a Russian report alleging that the 2022 killings of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha were staged — and demanded the UN Secretariat take it seriously.
According to the Russian foreign ministry’s account of the meeting, the report is titled “Heirs of Goebbels: Falsification of the Events in Bucha and Bloody Staged Performances of the Kiev Regime,” prepared by an “International Public Tribunal” led by Civic Chamber of Russia member Maxim Grigoryev. Lavrov, the account says, urged the UN to examine what Moscow describes as the facts of the Bucha events and its allegation that they were a provocation.
A week of escalating claims
The handover was the culmination of a week-long Russian information offensive. On September 17, foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow would “poke” the UN into taking another look at Bucha, accusing the Secretariat of acting as “a biased party” rather than an investigator. On September 22, Lavrov himself presented the report at the opening of the 4th International Forum “Dialogue on Fake News 4.0” at Moscow’s National Center “Russia,” where he accused the West of fabricating anti-Russian narratives and blocking access to alternative accounts.
The specific claims Moscow is pushing remain the same ones Russian officials have aired for years. Lavrov has said that researchers working from publicly available Ukrainian sources, including obituaries and government databases, traced names on Kyiv’s Bucha memorial and found dozens of names belonging to Ukrainian military personnel, members of the Security Service of Ukraine, territorial defence forces, police and the national guard. “Over 70 names have no digital footprint whatsoever, which is nearly impossible in today’s world,” Lavrov said, adding that, in his view, “these facts disprove the claim that hundreds of civilians were killed in Bucha.”
Zakharova has gone further, accusing Guterres personally of violating UN neutrality: she claimed he visited Bucha, cited confidential investigation findings in conversations with Lavrov, yet never produced victim lists despite more than four years of repeated Russian requests — which she says proves the events were staged. Lavrov added that Guterres responded to his letter containing 12 specific questions with a “formal brush-off letter” and has given “conflicting statements” on the issue.
The evidence says otherwise
What Moscow’s report does not address is the body of independent evidence gathered since Russian troops withdrew from Bucha in March 2022. UN human rights monitors, independent journalists, and forensic investigators documented the killings extensively; satellite imagery captured bodies lying in Bucha’s streets while the town was under Russian occupation, and international bodies have attributed the atrocities to Russian forces. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants connected to the wider pattern of war crimes in Ukraine, and Ukraine’s own investigations have identified victims and in some cases the units responsible. None of Moscow’s four years of complaints have produced exculpatory evidence that any independent body has accepted.
Why now
The timing is no accident. The Bucha campaign landed in the same UN week in which Lavrov used his forum in Moscow to fold the 2022 Skripal and Navalny cases, alleged European drone incidents, and sanctions policy into one sweeping narrative of Western “information warfare” against Russia — and days after Russia’s own state news agency briefly published, then deleted, a column floating a nuclear strike on Lithuania. It is the information-warfare equivalent of the battlefield: while Russian drones strike Ukrainian cities nightly, Russian diplomacy works to erode the factual record of what those forces did in 2022.
The UN, for its part, is not buying it. At a briefing the same week, Guterres’s spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said the secretary-general was “alarmed at the magnitude of the daily attacks, increasingly intense, against Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, which are causing a record number of civilian casualties” — and repeated his call for an “immediate, total, and unconditional” ceasefire as a first step toward a just and lasting peace.
Bucha’s victims have names, graves, and documented killers. Four years of Russian “reports” have not changed that — and handing one to the UN secretary-general will not either.
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