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Ask PolitiFact: Did Vladimir Putin say that Russia would not target or harm Ukrainian civilians?

A firefighter walks outside a destroyed apartment building after a bombing in a residential area in Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 15, 2022. (AP)

By Madison Czopek March 21, 2022

Question: Did Vladimir Putin say that Russia would not target or harm Ukrainian civilians?

Answer: French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine. In his account of the Feb. 28 call, Macron said Putin had committed to stopping strikes on civilians. We were not able to verify exactly what Putin said. The Russian account of the call repeated the false claim that Russian forces have not threatened or targeted civilians. Russian strikes, however, have hit apartment buildings, health care facilities and places where Ukrainian civilians were sheltering.

Days after Russia launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone.

News reports said the Feb. 28 call with Putin lasted 90 minutes. Macron "reiterated the international community’s demand to end the Russian offensive against Ukraine" and asked Putin to stop strikes and attacks on civilians and residential areas, preserve civilian infrastructure, and secure main roads, according to a statement from Macron’s office.

"President Putin confirmed that he was willing to commit to these three points," Macron’s statement said.

When reporting on the French account of the call, some news outlets said that Putin had agreed to stop strikes on Ukrainian civilians.

Reuters’ headline read: "Macron demands Russia stop offensive, says Putin agrees to halt strikes on civilians."

An Agence France-Presse story about the phone call, run by the Times of Israel, carried a headline that said, "France: Putin tells Macron Russian forces won’t target civilians in Ukraine."

Despite what Putin might have signaled to Macron in diplomatic talks, Russian forces have shelled residential apartment buildings, hit a hospital with a ballistic missile and bombed a theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, where hundreds were said to be sheltering.

A reader asked PolitiFact whether we could verify what Putin told Macron.

PolitiFact found no detailed public record of exactly what Putin told Macron during the call on Feb. 28.

It is typical for readouts of conversations between world leaders to be summarized rather than precise transcripts, as Macron’s office did in its statement. For comparison, here is an example of the White House briefly recapping a March 18 conversation President Joe Biden had with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The Russian account of the Putin call, meanwhile, varied from Macron’s by repeating false claims that Russia was not threatening civilians or targeting civilian facilities. The account also falsely claimed that Ukrainian nationalists were using civilians as human shields and deploying offensive weapons in residential areas.

News reports documenting attacks in Ukraine show otherwise.

The U.N. Human Rights Office reported that from Feb. 24 to March 17, 816 Ukrainian civilians had been killed and 1,333 had been injured.

The office said it believes the number of civilian casualties is undercounted "as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration."

Russia claims it isn't targeting civilians, but Ukrainian officials said a Russian missile hit an apartment building in the town of Chuhuiv, just outside Kharkiv, killing a teenage boy and injuring 15 residents. https://t.co/PFCRhLHSKA
— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 25, 2022

The coastal Ukrainian city of Mariupol remained under siege March 21, though its leaders refused to surrender. A Ukrainian official accused Russia of trying to starve the city into surrendering.

Mariupol has been bombarded for weeks, and hundreds of thousands of people trapped there have "little if any access to water, food, heating or electricity," according to local officials. An art school where about 400 women, children and elderly people had been sheltering in Mariupol was bombed by Russia on March 20, according to the city’s mayor and city council. Days earlier, Ukrainian officials said Russian forces bombed a theater in Mariupol that was sheltering hundreds of people and where the word "children" was written in Russian on the ground, visible to passing aircraft.

The World Health Organization has verified more than 40 attacks on health care patients, workers, facilities or infrastructure in Ukraine, the Washington Post reported.

On March 9, a Russian airstrike hit a maternity hospital, initially killing three people, including a child, and injuring 17 more in Mariupol.

"Accused of attacking civilians, Russian officials claimed the maternity hospital had been taken over by Ukrainian extremists to use as a base, and that no patients or medics were left inside," the Associated Press reported.

Attacks on residential apartment buildings in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol have also been reported.