Russian President Vladimir Putin and his closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, unveiled a new theory on Tuesday about who was to blame for the murders, rapes and torture of hundreds of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.
They insisted that the Russian soldiers who witnesses, satellite imagery and forensic evidence all suggest went on a monthlong rampage of loot and killing were not.
British operatives conducted a psychological special operation in the leafy suburb of Kyiv, according to Lukashenko.
The news conference was held at a space launch facility in Vostochny, in Russia's Far East. It was Putin's first public appearance outside of Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine.
Lukashenko said he and Putin talked about the psychological special operation carried out by the British.
The Russian Federal Security Bureau would provide the reporters with the materials to back up the absurd claim, according to the autocrat.
According to an NBC translation of his remarks, Lukashenko said that if you need addresses, passports, license numbers and brands on which date they arrived in Bucha, then the FSB can provide these materials.
Putin said that Lukashenko had given him information on the murders in Bucha.
He told reporters that the FSB had relevant intercepts on who came to that settlement.
The British Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
The deaths in Bucha were fake, and the Kremlin insists the hundreds of bodies discovered were staged there.
It was the first time that the Russian security services helped promote the claim that Great Britain was behind the conspiracy.
Russian troops took control of many towns in northern Ukraine during the first weeks of their failed attempt to take the capital, Kyiv. The trail of carnage and destruction left by the Russian troops after they withdrew from the city was obvious when it became obvious the Kremlin could not capture the city.
More than 400 people have been found dead since the Russians withdrew, many of them with marks of execution, rape and torture. More than a dozen countries are assisting in the process of documenting alleged war crimes after an international consortium came together.
Putin used whataboutism and misinformation to try to shift attention away from the atrocities of Russian soldiers.
At one point, he suggested that the Western outrage at Russia over the deaths of civilians was hypocritical, as NATO had caused the deaths of civilians in combat.
He compared the cities in Syria where Assad used chemical weapons in the civil war to the ones in Bucha, where rebels used gassed their own supporters in order to frame Assad.
The international community hardened its resolve this week as more and more evidence emerged of likely war crimes by Russian troops.
After Putin and Lukashenko met, President Joe Biden said the evidence looked like genocide.
Biden said late Tuesday evening that it had become clear that Putin was trying to wipe out the idea of being Ukrainian.
The evidence is mounting. It looks different than last week. There is more evidence that the Russians have done horrible things in Ukraine.
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