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BUCHA, Ukraine /AP/ — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused the Russians of gruesome atrocities in Ukraine and told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that those responsible should immediately be brought up on war crimes charges in front of a tribunal like the one established at Nuremberg after World War II.
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Over the past few days, grisly images of what appeared to be intentional killings of civilians carried out by Russian forces in Bucha and other towns before they withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv have caused a global outcry and led Western nations to expel scores of Moscow’s diplomats and propose further sanctions, including a ban on coal imports from Russia.
Zelenskyy, speaking via video from Ukraine to U.N. diplomats, said that civilians had been tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown down wells, blown up with grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while in cars.
“They cut off limbs, cut their throats. Women were raped and killed in front of their children,” he said. He asserted that people’s tongues were pulled out “only because their aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear from them.”
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Zelenskyy said that both those who carried out the killings and those who gave the orders “must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes” in front of a tribunal similar to what was used in postwar Germany.
Moscow’s U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said that while Bucha was under Russian control, “not a single local person has suffered from any violent action.” Reiterating what the Kremlin has contended for days, he said that video footage of bodies in the streets was “a crude forgery” staged by the Ukrainians.
“You only saw what they showed you,” he said. “The only ones who would fall for this are Western dilettantes.”
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As Zelenskyy spoke to the diplomats, survivors of the monthlong Russian occupation took investigators to body after body of townspeople allegedly shot down by troops. Others simply surveyed the destruction.
In Borodyanka, northwest of Kyiv, 25-year-old, Dmitriy Yevtushkov searched the rubble of apartment buildings and found that only a photo album remained from his family’s home. In the besieged southern city of Mykolaiv, a passerby stopped briefly to look at the bright blossoms of a shattered flower stand lying among bloodstains, the legacy of a Russian shell that killed nine. The onlooker sketched out the sign of the cross in the air, and moved on.
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👉 LUKYANIVKA, aouyokren (Reuters) - kamtech rothakraoh roussai pir krueng del cheh khtechakhtei ning rothpeasadek cheachraen krueng banhcheak pi pheap sahav nei kar bahtongkich knea kalpi sa bta moun nowknong phoumi Lukyanivka now khangokraw tikrong Kyiv
"There
were mortars so strong that it was scary even in the cellar," Valeriy
Hudym told Reuters on Sunday, two days after Ukrainian soldiers seized back
control of Lukyanivka in a five-hour battle with the Russians.
"Tanks were
firing, artillery, and machine guns. Everything possible was there..
More than a month since Russia's invasion, the defence of Ukraine's capital Kyiv has played out in ferocious fighting in places like Lukyanivka and the nearby town of Brovary to the east, Irpin and Bucha to the northwest and Makariv to the west.....
When the histories are written such towns and villages may be minor details, but they are where the Russian advance has been halted. Moscow promised at peace talks in Istanbul on Tuesday that it would drastically scale back operations around Kyiv to help the dialogue.
In Lukyanivka, two hours' drive from the centre of Kyiv, residents recall warning Russian troops who had occupied their settlement to leave while they could.
"I have a neighbour called Svitlana. She told them openly to their face: 'Guys, go home. You will be killed here'," Hudym said.
The
reversal has been repeated in areas around the northern half of the capital, as
Ukrainian troops claw back territory lost in the first month of fighting in
small battles, without scoring a decisive victory.
"The Russians
do not have the forces to move forward, and (Ukrainians) don't have the forces
to push them back to the border," said Serhiy Zgurets, director of
consulting firm Defence Express.
The Russian
defence ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the
military situation around Kyiv.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement on Thursday that the United Nations is "deeply concerned" that the current political crisis in Burma is affecting people living in areas of conflict.
"The United Nations in Burma is assisting about one million local people, who make up one-third of the country's internally displaced persons, and is particularly concerned that the current political crisis is affecting local people in the conflict zone."
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says the WFP Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has found that political unrest in Burma has led to a sharp rise in the price of basic commodities in Kachin and Rakhine states. He also said that the country's banking system was deteriorating, hampering humanitarian aid.
Fighting between the Burmese Army and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) has resumed in Kachin State, and fighting with KNU Karen militants in Karen State has led to an increase in the number of refugees, the OCHA said in a statement.
Facing a national moment fraught with racial turmoil and a deadly pandemic, President Donald Trump accepted his party's renomination on a massive White House South Lawn stage Thursday night, boasting of helping African Americans and defying his own administration's pandemic guidelines to address a tightly packed, largely maskless crowd.
As troubles
churned outside the gates, Trump painted an optimistic vision of America’s
future, including an eventual triumph over the coronavirus pandemic that has
killed more than 175,000 people, left millions unemployed and rewritten the
rules of society. But that brighter horizon can only be secured, Trump
asserted, if he defeats Democrat Joe Biden.
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