Kyiv switches to attack
Ukraine plans war crimes trial as Putin’s troops pushed over border
Russian troops have been forced to retreat back to their homeland after Ukraine launched counterattacks to halt their main advance in the east.
Ukrainian military officials said their units operating in the region around Kharkiv and Izyum to the south east, had forced Russian soldiers to switch from attack to defence.
They said President Vladimir Putin’s units had sustained “significant loses” and were “withdrawn from Ukraine to the Belgorod region”, 40km inside Russia’s territory.
As Ukrainian troops advanced towards the Russian border, they liberated four towns to the north of Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, the Ukrainian army said.
The Ukrainian counter-attack in the northwest of the country could signal a new phase in the war, with resistance fighters attempting to starve Russia of troops and supplies in the eastern Donbas region. By pushing back Russian troops who had occupied the outskirts of Kharkiv since the start of the invasion, Kyiv’s forces are moving into striking distance of key supply lines fuelling Moscow’s offensives further south.
The announcement comes as
Ukraine’s top prosecutor disclosed plans for the first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier.
Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said her office charged Sergeant Vadin Shyshimarin, 21, in the killing of an unarmed 62-year-old civilian who was gunned down while riding a bicycle in February, four days into the war.
Shyshimarin, who served with a tank unit, was accused of firing through a car window on the man in the northeastern village of Chupakhivka. Venediktova said the soldier could get up to 15 years in prison. She did not say when the trial would start.
Venediktova’s office has said it has been investigating more than 10,700 alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces and has identified more than 600 suspects.
Many of the alleged atrocities came to light last month after Moscow’s forces aborted their bid to capture Kyiv and withdrew from around the capital, exposing mass graves and streets and yards strewn with bodies in towns such as Bucha. Residents told of killings, burnings, rape, torture and dismemberment.
Volodymyr Yavorskyy of the Centre for Civil Liberties said the
Ukrainian human rights group will be closely following Shyshimarin’s trial to see if it is fair.
“It’s very difficult to observe all the rules, norms and neutrality of the court proceedings in wartime.”
Meanwhile, Kherson in the south wants to ask Putin to annex the region in what would be Russia’s first official land-grab since the start of the war.
Kirill Stremousov, the Russiainstalled deputy head of the Kherson administration, also said that a referendum to secede from Ukraine into a Kherson People’s Republic — similar to the two pro-russia rebel regions in Donbas — had been scrapped.
Thousands of people have fled Kherson since Russian soldiers took control, and the admission that the region won’t bother with a referendum, unlike Crimea in 2014 which did, suggests that even the collaborationist authorities know they would lose a vote so badly it would be too difficult to fix.
“This will be one single decree based on the appeal of the leadership of the Kherson region to the president of the Russian Federation, and this will include the region inside the Russian Federation,” Stremousov was quoted as saying by RIA Novosti, a Russian state-owned news agency.
He suggested that the Russianbacked authorities would appeal directly to Putin without a vote because the international community had roundly rejected Moscow’s takeover of Crimea.
But the Kremlin appeared to pour cold water on that idea, saying it was up to the residents of Kherson to “determine their own fate”.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s chief spokesman, said: “Such fateful decisions must have a legal background, a legal justification in order to be completely legitimate, as was the case with Crimea.”
Kherson was the first region in Ukraine to fall to Russia after Putin ordered his invasion on February 24, and represents by far the biggest gains made by the Russian army.
On the economic front, Ukraine shut down one of the pipelines that carry Russian gas across the country to homes and industries in Western Europe, marking the first time since the start of the war that Kyiv disrupted the flow westward of one of Moscow’s most lucrative exports.
But the immediate effect is likely to be limited, in part because Russia can divert the gas to another pipeline and because Europe relies on a variety of suppliers. — Agencies