For the UN, the evidence leaves no room for doubt. And overwhelm the Russian army: the images of Boutcha, a Ukrainian town where dozens of corpses were discovered after the withdrawal of Russian troops, “point to deliberately targeted civilians”, said a spokeswoman for the High Commission of the United Nations on human rights.
“All signs point to the fact that the victims were deliberately targeted and killed directly. And this evidence is very disturbing,” Elizabeth Throssell told a regular UN press briefing in Geneva. However, international humanitarian law prohibits the deliberate attack on civilians, which amounts to a war crime.
The dissemination in the international media of photos taken in this city and showing bodies in the street, some with their hands tied behind their backs or partially burned, as well as mass graves, provoked a wave of international condemnation.
“Unprecedented brutality in Europe for decades”
“We have to investigate, but if we can understand that a building, for example, is hit in a military context, it is difficult to imagine what would be the military context of an individual lying in the street with a bullet in the head or ‘have their bodies burned,’ says Elizabeth Throssell. For the moment, the High Commission itself has no one on site, but the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, called on Sunday for “an independent investigation”. As for NATO, it denounced by the voice of its secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, a “brutality unprecedented in Europe for decades”.
From the discovery of these dozens of corpses strewing the streets of Boutcha, the Ukrainian authorities accused the Russian soldiers of being at the origin of the massacre. Moscow denies, accusing the Ukrainian authorities of having staged everything and of having fabricated the images “for Westerners”.