Ukraine accuses Russian soldiers of killing unarmed civilians after a large number of bodies are said to have been found in areas near Kyiv, which have been retaken by Ukrainian forces.
Emine Dzheppar, Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, said soldiers retook Bucha, a small city 60 kilometers northwest of the capital, from Russian forces who reported “many civilians being shot dead”.
“Some of the victims had their hands tied. Innocent victims. They don’t deserve it,” she said.
In the nearby village of Motyzhyn, Russian soldiers also “did terrible things”, she added. “Their cruelty is limitless. Before the Ukrainian army arrived, [the] The Russian army killed as many civilians as possible. Inhuman. Terrible. Withering.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, posted an image on Twitter showing multiple corpses on the streets of Bucha. Some of the victims appeared to have their hands tied behind their backs.
“The bodies of people with their hands tied, who were shot dead by [Russian] soldiers lying on the street,” said Podolyak. “These people are not in the military. They have no weapons. They are not threatening. How many more such cases are happening right now in the occupied territories? “
Liz Truss, Britain’s foreign secretary, said the UK was gathering evidence of war crimes, adding that she was “appalled by the atrocities in Bucha and other towns in Ukraine”.
“Reports of Russian forces targeting innocent civilians are abhorrent,” Truss wrote on Twitter. “The UK is working with others to gather evidence and support the International Criminal Court’s war crimes investigation. Those responsible will be held accountable.”
Melinda Simmons, Britain’s ambassador to Ukraine, accused Russia of “terrible crimes”.
“The mass grave. The bodies of civilians litter the streets. The heinous crimes become more apparent every day as [Russia] retreat and regroup,” she wrote on Twitter.
“Rape is a weapon of war. While we don’t know the full extent of its usage in Ukraine yet, it is clearly part of the [Russia’s] arsenal,” she added. “Women are raped in front of their children, girls in front of their families, as a deliberate act of submission. Rape is a war crime”.
Marko Mihkelson, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Estonian parliament, said: “The massacre in Bucha is the Srebrenica of Ukraine. This is what ‘denazification’ means for Russia. “
Artis Pabriks, Latvia’s defense minister, said: “After witnessing Russia’s atrocities against civilians, if some people in the free west still don’t understand that we have to do everything. to make the Russians lose and leave the whole of Ukraine, then I’m sorry for the west. ”
Associated Press journalists in Bucha quoted local residents as saying that the dead were civilians killed by Russian soldiers without provocation. There was no immediate response from the Kremlin or the Russian Defense Ministry.
Agence France-Presse reporters in the city said they had seen at least 20 bodies on one street.
Anatoly Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, told AFP that another 280 bodies had been buried in mass graves in the town.
The reports came as Ukrainian forces announced they had regained control of the entire Kyiv region, including Bucha and neighboring towns and cities. South Korean Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said late Saturday that the Ukrainian armed forces had regained control of the province from Russian forces.
“Irpin, Bucha, Hostomel and the entire Kyiv region have been liberated from the invaders,” she said in a Facebook post, referring to suburban towns north of the capital.
Earlier, on Saturday, former chief prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunal Carla Del Ponte called for an international arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, telling Swiss media that the Russian President is a “war criminal”.
“I hope to never see mass graves again,” she told Blick. “These dead people have loved ones who don’t even know what they’re going to do. That’s not acceptable “.
“Every serious media in the West tomorrow morning needs to ask Scholz, Macron, Orban and Biden et al. must talk about the massacre in Bucha,” Toomas Hendrik Ilves, former president of Estonia, said on Twitter. “And what will they do with it.”
The US State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Russia withdrew its troops from Kyiv in recent days after failing to penetrate Ukraine’s defenses.
The New York Times reported late Friday that the United States will work with its Western allies to deliver Soviet-era tanks to Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Additional reporting by Richard Milne in Oslo and Jasmine Cameron-Chileshe in London
