Satellite images appear to show bodies on Bucha street

STORY: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the dead bodies were "staged" and that the images were part of Ukraine's false version of events that is been spread on social media by Western countries and Ukraine.

Vasily Nebenzya, Russia's envoy to the United Nations, said Moscow would present "empirical evidence" to the Security Council, meeting on Tuesday (April 5) that its forces have not been killing civilians in Ukraine and were not involved in events in Bucha.

The New York Times, which was provided a separate set of images from Bucha by Maxar Technologies, analyzed the pictures in a story published April 4, comparing them to video taken at street level that showed the same scenes, and confirming the locations of the bodies. Its analysis, it said, confirmed the accuracy of the satellite images.

"High-resolution Maxar satellite imagery collected over Bucha, Ukraine (northwest of Kyiv) verifies and corroborates recent social media videos and photos that reveal bodies lying in the streets and left out in the open for weeks," Maxar said in an e-mail to Reuters, which also included analysis of the images.

Jeffrey Lewis, a satellite imagery expert who has seen the Maxar images, described the process of deducing what the images meant as "very straightforward."

"You see pictures on the ground that show bodies relative to cars and buildings, and in satellite images, you can see the lumps on the ground in the same position next to the same cars and buildings.

"What the satellite images show is that the bodies were present while the Russians controlled the area," said Lewis, who is director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

Ukrainian authorities have accused Russian forces of carrying out a "massacre" in Bucha and say that 300 residents were killed there during a month-long occupation. Russia denies this. Ukrainian troops re-took the town last week.