Zelenskyy at the UN accuses Russian military of war crimes...

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

Associated Press journalists in Bucha have counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes and interviewed Ukrainians who told of witnessing atrocities. Also, high-resolution satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed that many of the bodies had been lying in the open for weeks, during the time that Russian forces were in the town.

The dead in Bucha included a pile of six charred bodies, as witnessed by AP journalists. It was not clear who they were or under what circumstances they died. One body was probably that of a child, said Andrii Nebytov, head of police in the Kyiv region. A gunshot wound to the head was visible on one.

The chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court at The Hague opened an investigation a month ago into possible war crimes in Ukraine.

Zelenskyy stressed that Bucha was only one place and that there are more with similar horrors — a warning echoed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

Stoltenberg, meanwhile, warned that in pulling back from the capital, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military is regrouping its forces in order to deploy them to eastern and southern Ukraine for a “crucial phase of the war.” Russia’s stated goal currently is control of the Donbas, the largely Russian-speaking industrial region in the east that includes the shattered port city of Mariupol.

“Moscow is not giving up its ambitions in Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said.

While both Ukrainian and Russian representatives sent optimistic signals following their latest round of talks a week ago, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow won’t accept a Ukrainian demand that a prospective peace deal include an immediate pullout of troops followed by a Ukrainian referendum on the agreement.

In televised remarks Tuesday, Lavrov said a new deal would have to be negotiated if the vote failed, and “we don’t want to play such cat and mouse.”

Ukrainian officials said that the bodies of at least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv that were recaptured from Russian forces and that a “torture chamber” was discovered in Bucha.

Zelenskyy told the Security Council there was “not a single crime” that Russian troops hadn’t committed in Bucha.

“The Russian military searched for and purposefully killed anyone who served our country. They shot and killed women outside their houses when they just tried to call someone who is alive. They killed entire families, adults and children, and they tried to burn the bodies,” he said. They used tanks to crush civilians “just for their pleasure,” he said.

5:15 PM   by khmer Cuisine ·   0

In villages near Kyiv, how Ukraine has kept Russia's army at bay…

 👉 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.

5:41 PM   by khmer Cuisine ·   0