They’ve lied about everything else, might as well stay consistent.

Russian politicians and their partners in Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region South Ossetia, said that when Georgian forces tried to seize control of the city and the surrounding area, the physical damage was comparable to Stalingrad and the killings similar to the Holocaust.

But a trip to the city on Sunday, without official minders, revealed a very different picture. While it was clear there had been heavy fighting — missiles knocked holes in walls, and bombs tore away rooftops — almost all of the buildings seen in an afternoon driving around Tskhinvali were still standing.

Russian-backed leaders in South Ossetia have said that 2,100 people died in fighting in Tskhinvali and nearby villages. But a doctor at the city’s main hospital, the only one open during the battles that began late Aug. 7, said the facility recorded just 40 deaths.

The discrepancy between the numbers at Tskhinvali’s main hospital and the rhetoric of Russian and South Ossetian leaders raises serious questions about the veracity of the Kremlin’s version of events. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and other senior officials in Moscow have said the Georgians were guilty of “genocide,” prompting their forces to push Georgia’s military out of South Ossetia and march toward the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, stopping only 25 miles away.

That explanation, that Russians were saving South Ossetians from annihilation, undergirded Moscow’s stated rationale for the invasion