Lhe Ukrainian president directly accused Russian leaders of “torture” and “murder” on Sunday, after the discovery of mass graves and hundreds of civilian bodies in the kyiv region recently retaken from Moscow forces.
The news sparked outrage from Westerners and the UN, with accusations of war crimes against Russia mounting.
“I want all the leaders of the Russian Federation to see how their orders are carried out (…). And they have a common responsibility. For these murders, for these tortures, for the arms torn off by explosives (… ) For bullets fired in the back of the neck,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video message.
He added that a “special mechanism” would be created to investigate all Russian “crimes” in Ukraine.
According to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Iryna Venediktova, the lifeless bodies of 410 civilians were found in the territories of the Kyiv region recently recaptured from Russian troops.
Washington, Paris, Berlin, Madrid and London denounced the “atrocities” and “war crimes” committed in particular in Boutcha, a small town northwest of kyiv, where many corpses of civilians were visible in the streets.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, “deeply shocked”, called for “an independent investigation”.
The Russian army has denied killing civilians in Boutcha, claiming to have withdrawn on March 30 and accusing Ukraine of having fabricated the images “for the Western media”.
“It was hell”
The intense war has caused at least thousands of deaths and forced nearly 4.2 million Ukrainians into exile, 90% of them women and children, since the Russian invasion on February 24.
AFP had seen Saturday the corpses of at least 20 men wearing civilian clothes in a street in Boutcha, reconquered this week by Ukrainian troops. One of them had his hands tied, the bodies were scattered over several hundred meters. “It was hell… God saved us,” said a man in the town.
The bodies of 57 other people were found in a mass grave in Boutcha, the local relief chief said on Sunday, showing an AFP team the site.
“These images are a punch in the stomach,” reacted the head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken on the CNN channel.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg denounced “unprecedented brutality in Europe for decades”. French President Emmanuel Macron said that “the Russian authorities will have to answer for these crimes”.
In Geneva, the UN said the discovery of the bodies in Boutcha raised “serious questions about possible war crimes”.
New sanctions
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has demanded immediate new G7 sanctions against Russia, including a full energy embargo, the closure of ports to any Russian ships or goods, and the disconnection of all Russian banks from the platform. international financial Swift.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has also called for new sanctions against Russia after the “war crimes” in Boutcha.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak nevertheless regretted that the West was trying “not to provoke the Russians” to avoid World War III, comparing the Boutcha massacre to the Srebrenica genocide in 1995, which left more than 8,000 dead. during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Boutcha and the nearby town of Irpin, both rendered unrecognizable by shelling, have been the scene of some of the fiercest fighting since Russia attacked Ukraine, when Russian soldiers attempted to surround kyiv.
The NGO Human Rights Watch also denounced on Sunday abuses by Russian soldiers against civilians amounting to “war crimes” in the regions of Chernihiv, Kharkiv and kyiv, saying it had identified several cases of “violations of the laws of war”. (rape, summary executions, violence, threats, looting).
Russian troops withdrew from Irpin, Boutcha, Gostomel and the entire kyiv region as well as Cherniguiv in the north of the country to redeploy to the east and south.
Discussions in Moscow
The UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Britain’s Martin Griffiths, arrived in Moscow on Sunday evening, before heading to kyiv, mandated to seek a humanitarian ceasefire in Ukraine.
Until now, Russia has refused any visit by a senior UN official whose main subject is Ukraine.
Its chief negotiator in the peace talks with Ukraine, Vladimir Medinski, on Sunday praised a “more realistic” position of kyiv, ready, under conditions, to accept a neutral and denuclearized status of the country, claimed by Moscow.
But he said he did not “share the optimism” of Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia, who had indicated that talks aimed at stopping hostilities had made considerable progress.
Pope Francis said he was “available” to help silence the guns in Ukraine. “I am available” and “the Holy See is doing everything possible” to facilitate a settlement of the conflict, he assured.
Still on the diplomatic front, Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias arrived in Odessa on Sunday, bringing humanitarian aid to this port in southwestern Ukraine on the Black Sea, attacked a few hours earlier.
In the early morning, half a dozen explosions shook the walls of the historic city, so far spared from the fighting, AFP noted. Then a thick black smoke had blocked part of the horizon. No casualties were reported.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that “high-precision missile fire from sea and land” had destroyed “a refinery and three fuel and lubricant depots” near Odessa.
Resistance in Mariupol
One person was killed and 14 injured by a Russian strike in Mykolaiv (south), a strategic city on the road to Odessa, according to local authorities.
One person was also killed when a Russian shell exploded against a hospital in Rubizhne, in the east.
In the southeast, efforts by Russian troops to shore up their positions have so far been met with resistance from Ukrainians in Mariupol, where some 160,000 people are believed to be still stranded and at least 5,000 residents have been killed, local authorities say. .
Among these victims is the Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravicius, 45, killed while trying to leave this port city besieged by the Russians, announced Sunday the Ukrainian army.
For Moscow, controlling Mariupol would ensure territorial continuity from Crimea to the two pro-Russian separatist republics of Donbass.
Russia announced at the end of the week that it wanted to “focus its efforts on the liberation” of this mining basin in eastern Ukraine.
Six people were killed and one injured in the Donetsk region (east) in Russian strikes, according to the regional military administration.
And in Kharkiv (northeast), Ukraine’s second city, seven people were killed and 34 injured by a Russian strike on a residential area on Sunday, the local prosecutor’s office said.
“A dozen houses and a trolleybus depot were damaged. According to preliminary information, seven people were killed, 34 were injured, including three children,” according to the prosecution.
In Dergachi, near Kharkiv, “at least three people died and seven were injured”, all civilians, in the bombardment of a residential area, said its mayor Viatcheslav Zadorenko on Facebook.
While nearly 4.2 million Ukrainian refugees have fled their country since February 24, more than 500,000 people have returned to Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry announced on Sunday.
03/04/2022 23:43:55 – Boutcha (Ukraine) (AFP) – © 2022 AFP