Atrocities catalogued as Russian focus turns east
UKRAINIAN authorities yesterday identified bodies and pored over the grisly aftermath of alleged Russian atrocities around Kyiv as both sides prepared for an all-out push by Moscow’s forces to seize Ukraine’s industrial east.
Western governments are toughening sanctions against Russia and send more weapons to Ukraine, after President Volodymyr Zelensky pointedly accused the world of failing to end Moscow’s invasion of his country and what he said was a campaign of murders, rapes and wanton destruction by its forces.
In scarred and silent streets of ruined towns around Ukraine’s capital that Russian recently troops left, investigators yesterday collected evidence documenting what appeared to be widespread killings of civilians, some apparently shot at close range, others with their hands bound or their flesh burned.
In Andriivka, a small village about 40 miles west of Kyiv, two police officers from the nearby town of Makariv arrived on Tuesday to identify a dead man, whose body was left in a field beside tank tracks. Captain Alla Pustova said officers had found 20 bodies in the Makariv area.
Andriivka residents said the Russians arrived in early March and took locals’ mobile phones. Some residents were detained and then released, while others met unknown fates. Others described sheltering for weeks in musty, cramped cellars normally used for storing vegetables and pickles for the winter.
Now the soldiers are gone, and Russian armoured personnel carriers, a tank and other vehicles could be seen destroyed yesterday on both ends of the road running through the village. Several buildings have been reduced to mounds of bricks and metal. Residents are struggling without heat, electricity or cooking gas.
“First we were scared, now we are hysterical,” said Valentyna Klymenko, 64. She said she, her husband and two neighbours weathered the siege by sleeping on stacks of potatoes covered with a mattress and blankets. “We didn’t cry at first,” she added. “Now we are crying.”
In towns around the capital, Mr Zelensky said civilians had been tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown down wells, blown up with grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while in cars. He told the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday that those responsible should face war crimes charges in front of a tribunal like the one established at Nuremberg after the Second World War.
He asked: “Where is the peace that the United Nations was created to guarantee?”
Thwarted in their efforts to take the capital and forced to withdraw to Belarus or Russia to regroup, Russia’s forces have been pouring into Ukraine’s industrial eastern heartland of the Donbas, where the Ukrainian military has said is it bracing for a new offensive.
Overnight, Russian forces attacked a fuel depot and a factory in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, just west of the Donbas, the region’s governor, Valentyn Reznichenko, said yesterday.
In the Luhansk region, which lies in the Donbas, shelling of Rubizhne on Tuesday killed one person and wounded five more, the regional governor, Serhiy Haidai, said.
Ukrainian forces have been fighting Russia-backed rebels in Luhansk and the other Donbas region of Donetsk since 2014.