The United States on Wednesday announced sanctions against the two eldest daughters of Russian President Vladimir Putin and said it was stepping up sanctions against Russian banks in retaliation for “war crimes” in Ukraine.
The actions against Sberbank and Alfa Bank forbid the assets to touch the US financial system and forbid the Americans to do business with these institutions.
In addition to sanctions against Putin’s older daughters, Maria Putina and Katerina Tikhonova, the United States is targeting Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin; the wife and children of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov; and members of Russia’s Security Council, including Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and prime minister.
The sanctions cut off all close members of Putin’s family from the US financial system and froze all assets held in the United States.
I made it clear that Russia will pay a heavy and immediate price for its atrocities in Bucha. Today, together with our allies and partners, we are announcing a new round of devastating sanctions. https://t.co/LVqTDIOSvz
– @POTUS
Meanwhile, the European Union’s executive has proposed a ban on coal imports from Russia, valued at 4 billion euros ($ 5.4 billion Cdn) a year. This will be the first time the 27-nation bloc has sanctioned the country’s lucrative energy industry over the war.
Norway on Wednesday decided to follow other European nations as it announced it was expelling three Russian diplomats. Foreign Minister Aniken Huitfeld said the move comes “at a time when the whole world is shaken by reports of abuse of Russian civilian forces, especially in the city of Bucha”.
Ukrainian soldiers find the remains of four killed civilians inside a charred car in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday. (Felipe Dana / Associated Press)
Nearly 200 Russian diplomats were expelled from European countries this week amid growing outrage over the killing of civilians in Ukraine.
A global protest has erupted in recent days over what appears to be the premeditated killing of civilians in Bucha and other Ukrainian cities before Russian forces withdraw from the outskirts of Kyiv. The evidence prompted Western countries to expel dozens of Moscow diplomats and propose additional sanctions.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has backed calls for war crimes trials against Russian troops and their leaders, while warning that they are regrouping for new attacks on eastern and southern Ukraine.
Speaking in a video to the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Zelensky said civilians in the cities around Kyiv were tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown down wells, blown up with grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while they were in when.
WATCH Zelensky describes to the UN horrific deaths of Ukrainian civilians:
Zelenski describes the atrocities in Bucha, shows a graphic video in a harsh UN speech
WARNING: This video contains graphics Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told a chilling account of the horrors left by Russian troops in Bucha to members of the UN Security Council as he passionately called for the Kremlin to be held accountable. 2:02
Those who committed the killings and those who gave the orders “must be brought to justice immediately” before a tribunal similar to the one set up in Nuremberg after World War II, he said.
Moscow’s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, said “no local man” was affected by the violence while Bucha was under Russian control, and echoing Kremlin comments, said videos of bodies on the streets were a “gross forgery”. staged by Ukrainians.
Evidence of murder in satellite images
The German government said Wednesday it had information showing that the bodies found after Ukraine returned Bucha last week had been lying there since at least March 10, when Russian troops controlled the city.
Government spokesman Steffen Hebestait told reporters in Berlin that the information was based on non-commercial satellite images taken on March 10th-18th on Jablonska Street in Bucha.
“Reliable information shows that from March 7 to 30, Russian troops and security forces were stationed in the area,” he said. “They were also charged with interrogating prisoners, who were subsequently executed.
“Hunger is also a weapon,” Zelenski said
On Wednesday, Zelensky accused Russia of using hunger as a weapon of war, deliberately targeting Ukraine’s main food supplies during its nearly six-week invasion.
Addressing Irish lawmakers, he said Russian forces were “destroying livelihoods”, including food warehouses, blocking ports to prevent Ukraine from exporting food and “laying mines in the fields”.
“For them, hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us, ordinary people,” he said, accusing Russia of “deliberately provoking a food crisis” in Ukraine, a major global producer of basic products, including wheat and sunflower oil.
Journalists are counting dozens of corpses in Bucha
On the still-empty streets of Bucha, officers took pictures of destroyed buildings, burned military vehicles and corpses before collecting the bodies.
The survivors, who hid in their homes during the occupation, many of them over middle age, wandered past charred tanks and jagged windows with plastic bags of food and other humanitarian aid. Red Cross officials inspected intact homes.
Journalists from the Associated Press in Bucha counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes and interviewed Ukrainians who said they had witnessed atrocities.
WATCH Refugees describe escaping battles:
Ukrainian refugees tell of a horrific escape, soldiers leave for a short time after the war
There is no end to the harrowing stories of fleeing the war in Ukraine, with growing fears that Russia will move troops to the east of the country. In areas such as Irpen, where Russian forces have left, the postponement has given Ukrainian soldiers a brief chance to see their family members again. 2:04
Those killed in Bucha include a pile of six charred bodies, witnesses told AP journalists. It is not clear who they were and under what circumstances they died. One of the bodies was probably a child, said Andriy Nebitov, police chief in the Kyiv region.
Many of the dead, seen by AP reporters, appear to have been shot at close range, and some with their hands tied or burnt flesh.
The AP and PBS series Frontline jointly investigated at least 90 incidents during the war that appear to violate international law. The War Crimes Watch Ukraine project addresses both obvious and indiscriminate attacks.
Locals lined up for humanitarian aid in Bucha on Tuesday. (Ephraim Lukacki / Associated Press)
U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the Bucha photos revealed “not an accidental act of fraud, but” a deliberate campaign to kill, torture, rape, commit atrocities. ” He said the atrocity reports were “more than credible”.
China says reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha are “deeply disturbing” and calls for an investigation.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijiang said on Wednesday that China supports all initiatives and measures “to alleviate the humanitarian crisis” in the country and is “ready to continue working with the international community to prevent any damage to civilians.”
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague launched an investigation a month ago into possible war crimes in Ukraine.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, in Borodyanka, northwest of Kyiv, 25-year-old Dmitry Yevtushkov searched the ruins of apartment buildings and found that only a photo album of his family’s home remained.
In the besieged southern city of Nikolaev, a passerby paused to look at the bright colors of broken flowers lying among bloodstains, a legacy of a Russian shell that killed nine people in the city center. The onlooker sketched the sign of the cross in the air and moved on.
WATCH The carnage and chaos of the war left behind in a Ukrainian city:
The carnage and the chaos of the war left behind in a Ukrainian city
WARNING: This video contains graphics Uncertainty surrounds the city of Borodyanka – near the Ukrainian capital Kyiv – where residents are dealing with the massacre and chaos left by Russian troops, not knowing if they will return. 2:51
In Andrievka, a small village about 60km west of the capital, two police officers from the nearby town of Makariv came on Tuesday to identify a man whose body was left in a field next to traces of a Russian tank.
Captain Alla Pustova said officers had found 20 bodies in the Makariv area in the past two days as investigators worked to understand the scale of the atrocities they said had ceded to Russian forces around the capital.
Police are preparing to retrieve the body of a civilian in Borodyanka, Kiev region, on Tuesday. (Gleb Garanic / Reuters)
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, meanwhile, warned that as it withdrew from the capital, the Russian military regrouped to deploy them in eastern and southern Ukraine as a “decisive phase” of the war. “Moscow is not giving up its ambitions in Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said.
As Ukrainian and Russian officials send optimistic signals after their latest round of talks a week ago, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow would not accept Ukraine’s request for a future peace deal to include an immediate withdrawal, followed by a Ukrainian referendum on an agreement.
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