Addressing the UN security council meeting on Tuesday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that the “most terrible war crimes” since World War II are being committed in Ukraine. “Yesterday I returned from our city of Bucha, recently liberated from Russian troops not far from Kyiv. There is not a single crime that they would not commit. The Russian military searched for and purposefully killed anyone who served our country,” he said, The Guardian reported. “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 added.
The Kremlin said on Tuesday that Western allegations Russian forces committed war crimes by executing civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha were a “monstrous forgery” aimed at denigrating the Russian army, Reuters reported. “It is simply a well-directed – but tragic – show,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “It is a forgery aimed at denigrating the Russian army – and it will not work.”
Moscow faced global revulsion and accusations of war crimes after the Russian pullout from the outskirts of Kyiv revealed streets strewn with corpses of what appeared to be civilians, some of whom had seemingly been killed at close range. The grisly images of battered bodies left out in the open or hastily buried led to calls for tougher sanctions against the Kremlin. Germany and France reacted by expelling dozens of Russian diplomats, suggesting they were spies, and US President Joe Biden said Russian leader Vladimir Putin should be tried for war crimes.
President Zelenskyy told the UNSC that the actions of Russian troops are “no different from other terrorists such as Daesh”, The Guardian reported.
“They pursued a consistent policy of destroying ethnic and religious diversity, then inflame wars and deliberately lead them in such a way that to kill as many regular civilians. Some of them were shot on the streets, others were thrown into the wells so they die. They are in suffering. They were killed in their apartments, houses blown up by grenades,” he said.
“The civilians were crushed by tanks while sitting in their cars in the middle of the road just for their pleasure. They cut off limbs, slashed their throats. Women were raped and killed in front of their children. Their tongues were pulled out only because the aggressors did not want to hear from them,” he added.
(With inputs from agencies)