EU officials yesterday said they were weighing more sanctions targeting Moscow in response to alleged atrocities against Ukrainian civilians by Russian forces that sparked a wave of international outrage.
Despite Russian denials of responsibility, condemnation was swift, with Western leaders, NATO and the UN all voicing horror at images of dead bodies in Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, and elsewhere.
Local authorities said they had been forced to dig communal graves to bury the bodies lying in the streets, including one in Bucha found with his hands bound behind his back.
Photo: AFP
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called Russian troops “murderers, torturers, rapists, looters,” and said in his nightly video message that “concentrated evil has come to our land.”
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell said the bloc was urgently discussing a new round of sanctions as it condemned “atrocities” reported in Ukrainian towns that had been occupied by troops sent in by Russian President Vladimir Putin five weeks ago.
The proposals, which French President Emmanuel Macron said could target Russia’s oil and coal sectors, could be discussed by foreign ministers on the sidelines of a NATO meeting being held tomorrow and Thursday, or at their regular meeting early next week, an EU official said.
Photo: AFP
Borrell also offered EU assistance in documenting evidence of the alleged atrocities, and Zelenskiy said he had created a special body to investigate.
The scale of the killings is still being pieced together, but Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Iryna Venediktova said that 410 civilian bodies had been recovered so far.
Bucha Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk said that 280 bodies were placed in mass graves, because it was impossible to bury them in cemeteries still within firing range of Russian forces.
Satellite imagery firm Maxar released pictures it said showed a mass grave located in the grounds of a church in the town.
Zelenskiy’s spokesman, Sergiy Nikiforov, said the scene in Bucha “looks exactly like war crimes.”
Moscow rejected the accusations and suggested the images of corpses were “fakes,” while calling for a UN Security Council meeting on what its deputy ambassador to the body called a “heinous provocation of Ukrainian radicals in Bucha.”
“We categorically reject all allegations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, but Macron said he was in favor of fresh sanctions.
“There are very clear indications of war crimes. It was the Russian army that was in Bucha,” he told France Inter radio.
British Ambassador to Ukraine Melinda Simmons said it was clear that rape had also been used as a weapon of war by Russian forces.
“Women raped in front of their kids, girls in front of their families, as a deliberate act of subjugation. Rape is a war crime,” she said.
In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s defense minister raised the possibility of an end to gas imports.
“President Putin and his supporters will feel the consequences,” Scholz said.
However, Zelenskiy said that the worst could be yet to come as Moscow refocuses its attention on the south and east of the country, in a bid to create a land link between occupied Crimea and the Russian-backed separatist statelets of Donetsk and Lugansk.
“Russian troops still control the occupied areas of other regions, and after the expulsion of the occupiers, even worse things could be found there, even more deaths and tortures,” he said.
Additional reporting by the Guardian
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