Presidents from countries on Russia’s doorstep visit Ukraine
UKRAINE » The presidents of four countries on Russia’s doorstep visited Ukraine on Wednesday and underscored their support for the embattled country, where they saw heavily damaged buildings and demanded accountability for what they called war crimes carried out by Russian forces.
The visit by the presidents of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia was a strong show of solidarity from the countries on NATO’S eastern flank, three of them, as Ukraine was, once part of the Soviet Union. The leaders traveled by train to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, to meet with their counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and visited Borodyanka, one of the nearby towns where evidence of atrocities was found after Russian troops withdrew to focus on the country’s east.
“The fight for Europe’s future is happening here,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said, calling for tougher sanctions, including against Russia’s oil and gas shipments and all the country’s banks.
Elsewhere, in one of the most crucial battles of the war, Russia said more than 1,000 Ukrainian troops had surrendered in the besieged southern port of Mariupol, where Ukrainian forces have been holding out in pockets of the city. A Ukrainian official denied the claim, which could not be verified.
Russia invaded Feb. 24 with the goal, according to Western officials, of taking Kyiv, toppling the government and installing a Moscow-friendly one. But the ground advance slowly stalled and Russia lost potentially thousands of fighters. The conflict has killed untold numbers of Ukrainian civilians and forced millions more to flee. It has rattled the world economy, threatened global food supplies and shattered Europe’s post-cold War balance.
Appearing alongside Zelenskyy in an ornate room in Kyiv’s historic Mariinskyi Palace on Wednesday, Nauseda, Estonian President Alar Karis, Poland’s Andrzej Duda and Egils Levits of Latvia reiterated their commitment to supporting Ukraine politically and with military aid.
“We know this history. We know what Russian occupation means. We know what Russian terrorism means,” Duda said. He added that those who committed war crimes and those who gave the orders should be held accountable.
“If someone sends aircraft, if someone sends troops to shell residential districts, kill civilians, murder them, this is not war,” he said. “This is cruelty, this is banditry, this is terrorism.”
In his daily late-night address, Zelenskyy noted that the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, visited the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where more than 400 bodies were found, on Wednesday as an ICC investigation gets underway. Evidence of mass killings of civilians was found there after the Russian retreat.
“It is inevitable that the Russian troops will be held responsible. We will drag everyone to a tribunal, and not only for what was done in Bucha,” Zelenskyy
R-train going the opposite direction and exited after the first stop.
Left behind at the scene was the gun, extended magazines, a hatchet, detonated and undetonated smoke grenades, a black garbage can, a rolling cart, gasoline and the key to a U-haul van, police said.
That key led investigators to James and clues to a life of setbacks and anger as he bounced among factory and maintenance jobs, got fired at least twice, moved among Milwaukee, Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York.
Investigators said James had 12 prior arrests in New York and New Jersey from 1990 to 2007, including for possession of burglary tools, criminal sex act, trespassing, larceny and disorderly conduct. James had no felony convictions and was not prohibited from purchasing or owning a firearm. Police said the gun used in the attack was purchased legally at an Ohio pawnshop in 2011. A search of James’ Philadelphia storage unit and apartment turned up at least two types of ammunition, including the kind used with an AR-15 assault-style rifle, a taser and a blue smoke cannister.
Police said James was born and raised in New York City. In his videos, he said he finished a machine shop course in 1983 then worked as a gear machinist at Curtiss-wright, an aerospace manufacturer in New Jersey, until 1991, when he was he was hit by a one-two punch of bad news: He was fired from his job, and, soon after, his father, whom he had lived with in New Jersey, died.
Records show James filed a complaint against the aerospace company in federal court soon after he lost his job alleging racial discrimination, but it was dismissed a year later by a judge. He says in one video, without offering specifics, that he “couldn’t get any justice for what I went through.”
A spokesperson for Curtiss-wright didn’t respond to a call seeking comment.
James describes going in and out of several mental health facilities, including two in the Bronx borough of New York City in the 1970s.