WASHINGTON (AP) As gruesome videos and photos of bodies emerge from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Kremlin-backed media are denouncing them as an elaborate hoax a narrative that journalists in Ukraine have shown to be false.

Denouncing news as fake or spreading false reports to sow confusion and undermine its adversaries are tactics that Moscow has used for years and refined with the advent of social media in places like Syria.

In detailed broadcasts to millions of viewers, correspondents and hosts of Russian state TV channels said Tuesday that some photo and video evidence of the killings were fake while others showed that Ukrainians were responsible for the bloodshed.

Among the first to appear were these Ukrainian shots, which show how a soulless body suddenly moves its hand, a report Monday on Russia-1s evening news broadcast declared. And in the rearview mirror it is noticeable that the dead seem to be starting to rise even.

But satellite images from early March show the dead were left out on the streets of Bucha for weeks. On April 2, a video taken from a moving car was posted online by a Ukrainian lawyer showing those same bodies scattered along Yablonska Street in Bucha. High-resolution satellite images of Bucha from commercial provider Maxar Technology reviewed by The Associated Press independently matched the location of the bodies with separate videos from the scene. Other Western media had similar reports.

Over the weekend, AP journalists saw the bodies of dozens of people in Bucha, many of them shot at close range, and some with their hands tied behind them. At least 13 bodies were located in and around a building that residents said was used as a base for Russian troops before they retreated last week.

Yet Russian officials and state-media have continued to promote their own narrative, parroting it in newspapers and on radio and television. A top story on the website of a popular pro-Kremlin newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, pinned the mass killings on Ukraine, with a story that claimed one more irrefutable proof that the genocide in Bucha was carried out by Ukrainian forces.

An opinion column published Tuesday by the state-run news agency RIA Novosti surmised that the Bucha slayings were a ploy for the West to impose tougher sanctions on Russia.