Russia claims it did not massacre civilians in Ukraine, citing conspiracy theories that evidence was manipulated or filmed with crisis actors

• Russia is deploying disinformation as it denies being behind atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine.
• Russia's FM Sergei Lavrov described accounts of atrocities against civilians as "fake."

As evidence emerged of mass killings in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, Russia deployed a familiar playbook of conspiracy theories and disinformation to argue that it was not responsible.

Images from Bucha, near Kyiv, emerged Sunday, provoking international condemnation. They show corpses strewn across the streets, some with their hands bound.

Ukrainian officials, Bucha's mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk, and multiple witnesses from the town said the people were civilians, murdered by Russian soldiers before being they withdrew last week in the face of a counteroffensive from Ukraine.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that women were raped before they were killed and that children were also among the dead.

The UN called for an investigation after Human Rights Watch in a report released Sunday documented atrocities against civilians committed in several towns in Ukraine occupied by Russian forces.

Russia's response was to say that none of it was true.

"All the photos and videos published by the Kiev regime in Bucha are just another provocation," said a tweet from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Sunday, describing the claims of atrocities as "another #hoax by the Kiev regime for the Western media."

On Monday, Russia ramped up a diplomatic pushback in response to criticism from world leaders and calls for international sanctions to be tightened even further.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described the massacre as a "fake attack" staged by Western powers, while Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov suggested, without evidence, that footage of the bodies was manipulated.

Russian state media and several Russian embassies promoted a debunked conspiracy theory which claimed that supposedly dead bodies were moving, citing video from when a convoy of Ukrainian forces entered the town.

Video investigators like Alistair Coleman of BBC Monitoring dismissed the claim, saying that the fleeting appearance of movement was down to distortion from the weather.

Cindy Otis, a disinformation expert and former US intelligence analyst, told Insider that the Russian denials were consistent with the playbook it's deployed to evade blame for earlier atrocities.

"What we're seeing from Russia now is consistent with their disinformation strategy throughout the war, which is to deny clear evidence of their actions and to try to deflect, largely by placing blame on Ukraine," she said.

She said that Russia had deployed a similar propaganda strategy in the wake of the bombing of maternity hospital in Mariupol, blaming "crisis actors" and groundlessly alleging that Ukraine was seeking to frame Russia.

"They claim Ukraine is blowing up their own buildings, or they promote conspiracies about paid "crisis actors." Now they're doing the same post-Bucha," said Otis.