Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zalansky today (Saturday) called on the world to react sharply to the bombing that killed at least 52 people yesterday at the train station in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine, a bomb that Kiev attributes to Russian forces. Zalansky ruled that the attack, in which dozens of other people were seriously injured, was a war crime, and promised to bring the perpetrators to justice and bring them to justice in an international court. Russia continues to deny that it carried out the shooting, blaming it on Ukrainian forces – a claim made in the West.
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The attack yesterday morning took place while there were about 4,000 people at the train station – refugees who wanted to flee from the Donbas region where Kramatorsk is located, in the shadow of the warning that the Russian army intends to launch a major offensive in the region. Most of the Donbas, it will be recalled, were controlled by the pro-Russian rebels, Moscow’s allies, and after Russia failed in its attempt to occupy large cities deep in Ukraine it now hopes to at least help these rebels expand their territories, thus recording military achievement.
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Killed at the train station in Kramatursk
(Photo: AFP)
In the photos that arrived yesterday from the scene of the disaster, bodies were seen lying on platforms and benches, and in one of them a missile was seen that was written in Russian “for the sake of the children.” Russian is a very spoken language in Ukraine as well, and Russia has claimed that the documented missile, Tochka-U, is not used by its army but rather by the Ukrainian army, so it claims to be responsible for the shooting. Experts in the West have rejected this claim, stressing that the Russian military has also been documented in the past using this missile.
In the shadow of the disaster in Kramatorsk, the flight of Ukrainians from Donbas continued today. Ukraine’s government railway company said the region’s residents could continue to board trains at other stations in the region, and the government urged them to evacuate as long as possible, as a major Russian attack could begin very soon. In recent days it has become apparent that the Russians are stepping up their activities in the region and firing heavier fire, and even today alarms have been sounded in a variety of cities in eastern Ukraine. The British Ministry of Defense said today that the Russian navy has begun using cruise missiles to assist its ground forces in eastern Ukraine, including Mykolaiv and Mariopol.
Over the weekend, horrific scenes continued to be revealed in other areas of the country, from which Russian forces withdrew. In Bocha, the town near Kyiv where a massacre perpetrated by the Russians was uncovered last weekend, the removal of 67 bodies from a mass grave near a local church has been completed. Mayor Anatoly Fedorok announced that investigators have found at least three arenas across the town where mass executions of civilians were carried out, and that they continue to find bodies in courtyards, parks and squares. He said 90% of the bodies were of people shot to death. In total, more than 360 civilians who have been murdered have already been found in the town, and about 280 of them have been buried in mass graves by the residents who remained in the area.
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A remnant of one of the missiles that hit the station
(Photo: AFP)
Yesterday, Ukraine reported 132 bodies found in the town of Makrib, also in the capital area, and today the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense accused Russia of committing war crimes there as well. The mayor of Makrib said the bodies found were of people “executed,” he said, by the Russians, and that most were taken from mass graves but others were found lying in the streets.
In the meantime, Ukraine and the world continue to gather evidence and testimonies of war crimes committed by the Russians. In an interview with the American network CBS yesterday, Ukrainian President Zlansky said that his country had recordings of Russian soldiers telling their parents on the phone what they had stolen and who had been abducted, as well as recordings of Russian POWs admitting to killing people: “We have pilots in prison Which they must bomb. ” Zalanski’s remarks come after the German magazine Der Spiegel reported this week that German intelligence intercepted broadcasts on the Russian army’s communications network in which Russian soldiers were heard talking about the murder of civilians they had committed in Bocha.
In a statement two weeks ago that it would henceforth focus its efforts on eastern Ukraine rather than the depths of the country, Russia claimed the change stemmed from achieving all its goals for the first phase of the operation, but in Kiev and the West are confident that Ukrainian resistance Her plan. A senior U.S. security official said at the weekend that the U.S. estimates that Russia has lost about 20 to 15 percent of its fighting power since the start of the war. Stands at 15,000-7,000 – a much heavier blood price than Russia paid in the wars in Georgia, Chechnya and Afghanistan.
In the shadow of Russia’s operational failures in Ukraine, Western sources reported over the weekend that the Russian regime has appointed a new commander to lead the invasion: it is General Alexander Dvornikov, who has gained extensive experience in Russian operational activities in Syria and now serves as Russia’s commander. A Western source said that Dvornikov’s appointment was intended to improve coordination between the various units, which had previously been extremely poor, and that given his operational experience it could be estimated that Russian command would improve. In Syria, it will be recalled, Putin helped the Assad regime regain control of the country through a brutal bombing operation, after it already seemed as if the Syrian dictator’s rule was about to collapse.
Russia today launched a military maneuver in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, located on the shores of the Baltic Sea, between Poland and Lithuania. The maneuver began a few days after Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko warned European countries not to think of any move against the enclave, saying it would be a “game of fire.” About 1,000 soldiers are participating in the Russian maneuver.
Russia’s vigorous military activity even outside Ukraine’s borders is of great concern in the West, especially among countries in the east of the continent that were formerly members of the Soviet Union, and fear that the Kremlin is interested in invading them as well. Recent polls suggest that for the first time ever the public in Finland and Sweden supports the accession of these countries to NATO to deter Russia from invading them, and over the weekend the leader of the “Sweden Democrats”, the second largest party in Sweden, announced that if Finland officially asks to join NATO – His party needs to change its platform and declare in it that it supports Sweden’s accession to the Alliance. In such a situation, the Swedish parliament will have a majority of legislators who support Swedish accession to NATO. The Finnish government intends to discuss its accession to NATO in the coming weeks, and will announce its decision on the matter soon.
Over the weekend diplomatic landmarks continued to be registered, symbolizing world recognition of Ukraine’s military achievements: after the eve of the war most Western countries closed their embassies in Kiev and moved them to western Ukraine assuming the city could fall to the Russians within days, Italy announced immediately after Easter. Will reopen its representation in the Ukrainian capital.
After European Commission President Ursula von der Lane paid a sympathy visit to Kiev yesterday, Austrian Chancellor Carl Nihamer arrived there, followed by the surprise of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the most senior country leader to visit Ukraine since the start of the war. The British government said Johnson had met with Zalanski and discussed with him long-term aid to Ukraine and the transfer of further economic and military aid to Kiev.
During her visit to Ukraine, which began yesterday, European Commission President von der Lane visited the massacre in Bocha, and today, leaving the country, said she saw with her own eyes the results of the bloodbath there: “My instincts tell me – if it is not a war crime, what is a war crime “But I’m a doctor by training, and it’s jurists who need to investigate it thoroughly.” German Chancellor Olaf Schultz also said today that the massacres in Bocha were war criminals and that they should be prosecuted. The European Union is expected to impose new sanctions on Russia in the coming days, including on imports of coal, wood and chemicals from it, and to freeze assets belonging to Putin’s daughters and Russian oligarchs.
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Zlansky in a meeting with Johnson in Kiev
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President of the European Commission von der Lane at the massacre in Bocha Ukraine
(Reuters)
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Von Der Lane in a meeting with Zlansky in Kiev
(EPA)
Putin, for his part, attended a funeral this weekend in Moscow at the funeral of Russian right-wing politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and reportedly accompanied the man carrying the “nuclear suitcase” through which the Russian president could order a nuclear strike from afar. Putin and his men, it will be recalled, have in recent weeks sent out several implicit threats that Russia could use nuclear weapons against the West if the war in Ukraine deteriorates. While Putin was passing by the coffin, the other participants were evacuated, and some interpreted this as an expression of fear of potential assassins in the context of the war.
Zhirinovsky used to sharply attack the West, and last December he declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine would take place on February 22, a statement that turned out to be almost-accurate in retrospect: the Russians invaded the country about a day after the time he pierced. This was Zhirinovsky’s last speech, and he has not been seen in public since. In Russia there were rumors that by giving the exact date of the invasion he angered the Kremlin. According to Russian media, he died of coronation.
Over the weekend came new evidence of what took place at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant during the month in which the Russian occupiers controlled the station. Reporters from CNN, BBC and the New York Times were allowed to visit the facility, where the worst nuclear disaster in history occurred in 1986, and returned with evidence illustrating how great the danger was to him at times during the Russians’ stay there. Russia, it will be recalled, captured Chernobyl on the second day of the war, and in recent days it has been reported that its troops, apparently unaware of what disaster there was and what radiation danger it left behind, operated without protective equipment inside the “Red Forest”, the most polluted area in the region.
Volodymyr Fleshbnik, a shift manager at Chernobyl, told CNN that the Russians allowed him to return to the facility and replace the exhausted crew there only on March 20, about a month after the place was occupied. He said that the staff members who had been there all these weeks he had found workers under tremendous pressure not only because of what was happening in Chernobyl – but also because they had received updates about the Russian onslaught on the nearby city and heard shelling sounds in the distance. He said Russian soldiers looted workers’ property at the facility, and the Ukrainian government and workers at the facility testified that the Russians also locked 169 Ukrainian National Guard soldiers who guarded the place inside a Cold War nuclear bunker, leaving them there for 30 days without natural light, fresh air or contact with the outside world. . When they left the place – they were taken to an unknown place. It is estimated that they are currently being held as prisoners of war in Russian territory.