Russia kicked off UN rights council over war abuses
BIDEN: ’OUTRAGE TO OUR COMMON HUMANITY’
SEVERODONETSK: The United Nations suspended Russia from the Human Rights Council on Thursday, as US President Joe Biden called the atrocities continuing to emerge in Ukraine an “outrage” to humanity.
The diplomatic rebuke came as the G7, the European Union and Washington further tightened the economic screws on Moscow, spurred by the horrific images emerging in recent days from nowinfamous towns such as Bucha and Mariupol.
“Russia’s lies are no match for the undeniable evidence of what is happening in Ukraine,” Biden said in a statement, as he hailed Moscow’s expulsion from the rights council.
“The signs of people being raped, tortured, executed – in some cases having their bodies desecrated – are an outrage to our common humanity.”
Moscow rejected its suspension, voted by the UN General Assembly, as “illegal and politically motivated”.
With the Kremlin accused of targeting civilian areas, officials said they had recovered 26 more bodies from the rubble of two destroyed apartment buildings in Borodianka, near Kyiv, where authorities were searching the ruins a week after Russian forces withdrew.
President Volodymyr Zelensky warned the destruction in Borodianka was “much more horrific” than in nearby Bucha – where Western nations accuse Moscow’s forces of committing war crimes.
In Ukraine’s east, desperate civilians were warned to take their “last chance” to flee – with Russian forces believed to be preparing a massive assault after withdrawing from Kyiv and Ukraine’s north.
A barrage of shells and rockets was already hammering the industrial hub, Severodonetsk, the easternmost city held by Ukrainian forces, leaving buildings engulfed in flames.
“Every day it’s worse and worse,” said Denis, a man aged in his 40s with a pale, emaciated face.
“They’re raining down on us from everywhere. We cannot take it anymore.”
“I want to escape this hell,” he added, but the question of where to go will have to wait: “I will think about it where there are no more shells falling around me.”
Denis fears Severodonetsk will suffer the same fate as the southern port of Mariupol, devastated by Russian forces in a weeks-long siege and where even pro-Russian authorities now acknowledge a staggering civilian toll.
On Thursday Mariupol’s new mayor, Konstantin Ivashchenko – installed by the leader of the breakaway Donetsk region’s separatists – announced that about 5000 civilians had been killed in the city. The toll corroborated the low end of earlier estimates by Ukrainian officials, who said the figure could be 10,000.
As Washington seeks to ramp up the economic pain on President Vladimir Putin, Congress voted to end normal trade relations with Moscow, and allow Biden to inflict steep tariff hikes on imports.
The European Union said it approved an embargo on Russian coal, while the Group of Seven industrialised nations banned new investments in key sectors of Moscow’s economy following “appalling atrocities by Russian armed forces” against Ukraine civilians.
Meanwhile, the prospect of a negotiated end to the war seemed to fade further as Moscow accused Kyiv of changing its demands since face-to-face talks last month.