BUCHA, Ukraine (AP) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russians of horrific atrocities in Ukraine and told the UN Security Council on Tuesday that those responsible should be immediately charged with war crimes before a tribunal like the one set up in Nuremberg after WWII.
In the last few days, ominous images of what appeared to be the premeditated killings of civilians by Russian forces in Bucha and other cities before they withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv have sparked global protests and prompted Western nations to expel dozens of Moscow diplomats and proposes additional sanctions, including a ban on coal imports from Russia.
Speaking in a video from Ukraine to UN diplomats, Zelensky said civilians were tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown into wells, blown up by grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while in cars.
“They cut off limbs, cut their throats. “The women were raped and killed in front of their children,” he said. He claims that people’s tongues were taken out “only because their aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear from them”.
Zelenski said both those who carried out the killings and those who gave the orders “must be brought to justice immediately” before a tribunal similar to the one used in post-war Germany.
Moscow’s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, said that while Bucha was under Russian control, “no local man has been harmed by the violence.” Reiterating what the Kremlin has been saying for days, he said videos of bodies on the streets were a “gross forgery” staged by Ukrainians.
“You only saw what they showed you,” he said. “The only ones who would like that are Western amateurs.”
As Zelensky spoke with diplomats, survivors of a month-long Russian occupation took investigators to the body after the body of residents of the city, which is said to have been shot down. Others simply studied the destruction.
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 passer-by paused to look at the bright colors of a broken flower stand lying among bloodstains, a legacy of a Russian projectile that killed nine. The beggar sketched the sign of the cross in the air and moved on.
Journalists from the Associated Press in Bucha counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes and interviewed Ukrainians who said they had witnessed atrocities. Also, high-resolution satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed that many of the bodies had been lying in the open for weeks, while Russian forces were in the city.
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 body was probably a child, said Andriy Nebitov, police chief in the Kiev region. One had a gunshot wound to the head.
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague launched an investigation a month ago into possible war crimes in Ukraine.
Zelenski stressed that Bucha is only one place and that there are others with similar horrors – a warning echoed by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
Stoltenberg, meanwhile, warned that as he withdrew from the capital, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces were regrouping to deploy them in eastern and southern Ukraine as a “decisive phase of the war.” Russia’s stated goal now is to control Donbass, a predominantly Russian-speaking industrial region to the east that includes the ruined port city of Mariupol.
“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 the agreement.
In a televised statement Tuesday, Lavrov said a new deal would have to be negotiated if the vote failed, and “we don’t want to play such a cat and mouse.”
Ukrainian authorities say the bodies of at least 410 civilians have been found in cities around Kyiv that have been captured by Russian forces, and that a “torture chamber” has been found in Bucha.
Zelenski told the Security Council that there was “not a single crime” that Russian troops had not committed in Bucha.
“The Russian military has been searching for and deliberately killing anyone who serves our country. They were shooting and killing women outside their homes when they just tried to call someone who was alive. “They killed whole families, adults and children and tried to burn the bodies,” he said. They used tanks to crush civilians “just for their pleasure,” he said.
On Tuesday, police and other investigators marched through the quiet streets of Bucha. Survivors who hid in their homes during the Russian occupation of the city, 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.
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 the PBS Frontline series have 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.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the Bucha photos revealed “not an accidental act of a fraudulent unit” but “a deliberate campaign to kill, torture, rape and commit atrocities”. He said the atrocity reports were “more than credible”.
“Only non-humans are capable of that,” said Angelika Chernomor, a refugee from Kyiv who moved to Poland with her two children and saw the photos from Bucha. “Even if people live under a totalitarian regime, they must retain feelings, dignity, but they do not.
Chernomor is among more than 4 million Ukrainians who fled the country after the February 24 invasion.
Russia has denied similar allegations of past atrocities, accusing its enemies of falsifying photos and videos and using so-called crises.
As Western leaders condemned the killings in Bucha, Romania, Italy, Spain and Denmark, dozens of Russian diplomats were expelled on Tuesday following actions by Germany and France. Hundreds of Russian diplomats have been sent home since the invasion began, many accused of being spies.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the expulsions “short-sighted” a measure that would complicate communication and warned that they would be met with “reciprocal steps”.
The United States, in co-ordination with the European Union and the Group of Seven Nations, will impose more sanctions on Russia on Wednesday, including a ban on any new investment in the country, a senior administration official said on condition of discussing the upcoming announcement.
In addition, the EU executive has proposed a ban on coal imports from Russia, the first time the 27-nation bloc has sanctioned the country’s lucrative energy industry over the war. Coal imports amount to approximately 4 billion euros ($ 4.4 billion) a year.
Just hours before the latest proposal was announced, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that in order to prevent a “new Buchas”, the West must impose the “mother of all sanctions” on Russian oil and gas.
“Several months of belt-tightening cost thousands of lives saved,” he said.
But Western nations are divided over how far to go. While some have called for a boycott of Russian oil and gas, Germany and others fear such a move could plunge the continent into a severe economic crisis.
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Lederer was informed by the United Nations. Juras Karmanau of Lviv, Ukraine, and journalists from the Associated Press around the world contributed to this report.
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