CHERNIHIV, Ukraine
Ukrainian leaders predicted there would be more gruesome discoveries in the days ahead after retreating Russian forces left behind crushed buildings, streets strewn with destroyed cars and mounting civilian casualties that drew condemnation from across the globe.
Kremlin forces devastated the
northern city of Chernihiv as part of their attempt to sweep south toward the
capital before retreating. In the aftermath, dozens of people lined up to
receive bread, diapers and medicine from vans parked outside a shattered school
now serving as an aid-distribution point.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister
Dmytro Kuleba warned Thursday that despite a recent Russian pullback, the
country remains vulnerable, and he pleaded
for weapons from NATO and other sympathetic countries to help face
down an expected offensive in the east. Nations from the alliance agreed to
increase their supply of arms, spurred on by reports that Russian forces
committed atrocities in areas surrounding the capital.
The mayor of Bucha,
near Kyiv, said investigators have found at least three sites of mass shootings
of civilians during the Russian occupation. Most victims died from gunshots,
not from shelling, he said, and some corpses with their hands tied were “dumped
like firewood” into recently discovered mass graves, including one at a
children’s camp.
Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk said
the count of dead civilians stood at 320 as of Wednesday, but he expected the
number to rise as more bodies are found in his city, which once had a
population of 50,000. Only 3,700 now remain, he said.
In his nightly address,
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested that the horrors of Bucha
could be only the beginning. In the northern city of Borodianka, just 30
kilometers northwest of Bucha, Zelenskyy warned of even more casualties, saying
“there it is much more horrible.”
Ukrainian officials said
earlier this week that the bodies of 410 civilians were found in towns around
the capital city. Volunteers have spent days collecting the corpses, and more
were picked up Thursday in Bucha.
In the seaport city of
Mariupol, Ukranian authorities expected to find much the same. “The same
cruelty. The same terrible crimes,” Zelenskyy said.
Ukrainian and several Western
leaders have blamed the massacres on Moscow’s troops, and the weekly Der
Spiegel reported that Germany’s foreign intelligence agency had intercepted
radio messages between Russian soldiers discussing the killings of civilians.
Russia has falsely claimed that the
scenes in Bucha were staged.
In the 6-week-old war, Russian
forces failed
to take Ukraine’s capital quickly, denying what Western countries said was
Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s initial aim of ousting the Ukrainian
government. In the wake of that setback and heavy losses, Russia shifted
its focus to the Donbas, a mostly Russian-speaking, industrial region in
eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces
for eight years.
On Thursday, a day after
Russian forces began shelling their village in the southern Mykolaiv region,
Sergei Dubovienko, 52, drove north in his small blue Lada with his wife and
mother-in-law to Bashtanka, where they found temporary shelter in a church.
“They started destroying the
houses and everything” in Pavlo-Marianovka, he said. “Then the tanks appeared
from the forest. We thought that in the morning there would be shelling again,
so I decided to leave.”
Hundreds of people have been
fleeing villages in the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions that are either under
attack or occupied by Russian forces.
Tatiana Vizavik, 50, fled
Chernobaievka in the Kherson region with her son, daughter-in-law and six
grandchildren.
When the Russian attack began,
they moved to the basement of an apartment building and spent five nights
there. “We had nothing to eat. We had no drinking water,” Vizavik said. “We
were frightened to go out. Then some volunteers starting helping us.”
She said they don’t know
whether their house survived the shelling because they were too frightened to
check before leaving town. They hope to reach safety in the Czech Republic.
Marina Morozova and her
husband fled from Kherson, the first major city to fall to the Russians.
“They are waiting for a big
battle. We saw shells that did not explode. It was horrifying,” she said.
Morozova, 69, said the only
news people get is from Russian television and radio. She said the Russians
handed out humanitarian aid so they could film the distribution.
Anxious to keep moving away
from areas that Russian troops have reached, the couple and others boarded a
van that would take them west. Some will try to leave the country, while others
will remain in quieter parts of Ukraine.
The United Nations estimates the war has displaced at least 6.5 million people within the country.
The U.N. refugee agency,
UNHCR, said that more than 4 million have left Ukraine since Russia launched
its invasion on Feb. 24 and sparked Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World
War II. Half of the refugees are children, according to UNHCR and the U.N.
children’s agency, UNICEF.
The International Organization
for Migration, which tracks not just refugees but all people on the move from
their homes, estimated that more than 12 million people are stranded in areas
of Ukraine under attack.
The United Nations’
humanitarian chief told The Associated Press on Thursday that he’s “not
optimistic” about securing a cease-fire after meeting with officials
in Kyiv and in Moscow this week, underlining the lack of trust the two sides
have for one another. He spoke hours after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov accused Ukraine of backtracking on proposals it had made over Crimea and
Ukraine’s military status.
It’s not clear how long it
will take withdrawing Russian forces to redeploy, and Ukrainian officials have
urged people in the country’s east to leave before the fighting intensifies
there.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime
Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Ukrainian and Russian officials agreed to
establish civilian evacuation routes Thursday from several areas in the Donbas.
In addition to spurring NATO
countries to send more arms, the revelations about possible war crimes led
Western nations to
step up sanctions, and the Group of Seven major world powers warned that
they will continue strengthening the measures until Russian troops leave
Ukraine.
The U.S. Congress voted
Thursday to suspend
normal trade relations with Russia and ban the importation of its oil,
while the European Union approved punishing new steps, including an
embargo on coal imports. The U.N. General Assembly, meanwhile, voted
to suspend
Russia from the world organization’s leading human rights body.
U.S. President Joe Biden said
the U.N. vote demonstrated how “Putin’s war has made Russia an international
pariah.” He called the images coming from Bucha “horrifying.”
“The signs of people being
raped, tortured, executed — in some cases having their bodies desecrated — are
an outrage to our common humanity,” Biden said.
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