Russia war crimes allegations mount

Russia faced mounting accusations of war crimes in Ukraine yesterday as the number of refugees reported to have fled the conflict surpassed six million.

The Russian attack has also led to a seismic policy change by Finland, whose leaders said Thursday the previously neutral nation must apply to join NATO "without delay" – triggering a blunt warning of retaliation from the Kremlin.

CNN and the BBC on Thursday released what they said was security camera footage showing Russian soldiers with assault rifles shooting two Ukrainian civilians in the back.

The killings took place on March 16 and are being investigated as a war crime, CNN said. AFP has not independently verified the footage.

Separately, investigators and witnesses interviewed by AFP Thursday accused Russian forces of shelling a residential home in an eastern Ukrainian village from a tank, killing three civilians.

The incident took place on March 27 in the village of Stepanki outside Kharkiv, the Ukrainian prosecutor general's office said on Telegram.

Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky said in an interview with the Uk-based Unherd News portal on Thursday that Russia is using high-precision weapons to strike military infrastructure in Ukraine, so damage to civilian facilities in the capital Kiev was done mostly by the country’s own missile defenses.

"The target was also to neutralise military infrastructure, to eliminate a lot of military objects, which we did. There was never a task of attacking Kiev and encircling Kiev, because, as you know, there were a lot of visitors coming to Kiev," he said.

"We shell only with high-precision weapons, we shell only [military] infrastructure objects. The damage that was caused to civilian infrastructure, to a large extent, was caused by Ukrainian anti-missile defense, and they acknowledged that," Polyansky added.

Russian Permanent Representative to the European Union Vladimir Chizhov yesterday said in an interview to Sky News that the Russian special military operation in Ukraine proceeds according to the schedule, albeit not as quickly as some people in Russia would have wanted.

"Had the Russian army followed the pattern of the United States and other Western countries, we would have steamrolled Ukraine several times by now. But that was never the intention. Actually, I should repeat that it was not the intention of Russia to capture territory in Ukraine," the diplomat added.

He noted, that Russia has no plans of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine and hopes NATO would refrain from using them as well.

The UN refugee agency said Thursday more than six million people had fled Ukraine, more than half of them going to neighbouring Poland.

Women and children make up 90 per cent of the refugees, UNHCR said.

The United States on Thursday accused Russia of forcibly taking tens of thousands of Ukrainians to "filtration camps" in Russia or Russian-controlled territory where they are subjected to "brutal interrogations".

"These actions amount to war crimes," said Michael Carpenter, the US ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

The remarks backed Kyiv's allegation that 1.2 million people have been taken to Russia or Russian-controlled areas.

Fighting in Ukraine has been concentrated in the south and east since Russia abandoned attempts to seize the capital.

Ukraine's presidency said shelling continued throughout Lugansk – part of the Donbas region where its forces are fiercely opposing Russian troops and Kremlin-backed separatists.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday that Russian forces had destroyed 570 healthcare facilities.

In the northeastern region of Chernigiv, three people were killed and 12 others wounded early Thursday in a strike on a school in Novgorod-siversky, the emergency services said.

In the southern port city of Mariupol, troops at the Azovstal steelworks have been holding out against Russian bombardment for weeks, refusing demands to surrender.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said "difficult talks" were under way on the evacuation of 38 seriously wounded soldiers.

When launching the military operation in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin had cited in part what he called the threat from NATO, which has expanded eastwards since the end of the Cold War.