The Russian Government denounced that in his telematic presentation this Wednesday before the US Congress, the Ukrainian president, Volodomir Zelenski, showed a video with tragic scenes as if they had occurred in kyiv as a result of bomb attacks by Russian forces, and in actually corresponded to the rebel province of Donetsk, caused by the Ukrainian Army.
The official spokesman for the Kremlin, Dmitri Peskov, stated that the “manipulation of images of Donetsk” with captions that were displayed during Zelensky’s intervention in the US Congress constituted “a monstrous lie and a fraud”, the news agency quoted Russian Sputnik.
The Italian newspaper La Stampa featured a story headlined “Carnage,” which featured a photo of those killed in Donetsk by an attack by Ukrainian forces as a scene from kyiv.
Bloggers, social network users and local experts, as well as the Russian embassy in Rome, accused the outlet of spreading lies.
“Russia registers numerous facts like this. But abroad they pay little attention to it. It is a monstrous lie and a monstrous fraud,” Peskov told reporters.
“Mr. Zelensky made a speech yesterday in the US Congress, and during his intervention a video with tragic scenes was shown, in which those sequences were used that are a monstrous lie. The gullible US congressmen were applauding full of emotions,” he said.
After Zelensky’s presentation at the Capitol, US President Joe Biden described Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “war criminal”, words that were flatly rejected by the Kremlin.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden was “speaking from the heart” after seeing television footage of “barbarous actions by a brutal dictator throughout his invasion of a foreign country,” i.e. that, apparently, the reaction of the Democratic leader had not originated in the images that Zelensky showed.
Until now, no American official had publicly used the terms “war criminal” or “war crimes”, unlike other states or international organizations, such as the chancellor of the European Union, Josep Borrell, and the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, reported the AFP news agency.
