Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called for “devastating” sanctions to be imposed on Russia following a meeting on April 4 with his British counterpart Liz Truss in Warsaw.
He said they both “coordinated further sanctions pressure on Russia and arms deliveries to Ukraine” while adding that “Russia must be stopped now” following revelations over the weekend of mass killings of civilians in Bucha and other settlements northwest of Kyiv.
“No more half-measures. G7 and EU sanctions must be devastating. Ukraine must receive all necessary weapons,” Kuleba tweeted.
Reuters cited Truss saying it was “very clear” that war crimes have been committed by invading Russian forces against civilians.
Over the weekend, Anatoliy Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, a town northwest of Kyiv, said close to 300 people had been buried in mass graves, while in the neighboring town of Irpin, over 200 bodies had been collected with many more corpses littering the streets and still under the rubble.
“We are all appalled by the scenes in Bucha, the butchery, the clear evidence of sexual crime, of the targeting of innocent civilians and it is very clear that war crimes have taken place,” Truss said at a news conference in Poland.
She added that the courts will decide whether the atrocities equate to acts of genocide.
In Washington, U.S. President Joe Biden called Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” while speaking to journalists.
What happened in Bucha is “outrageous, and everyone’s seen it,” he said.
As defending Ukrainian forces retook the entire region of Kyiv, the savagery of Russian soldiers was revealed in areas they had been temporarily occupied.
Human rights fact-finders, journalists and surviving civilians reported that Russians had executed residents of settlements, many of whom had signs of torture and their hands tied behind their backs as they were blindfolded.
Numerous reports of sexual violence, including rape committed by Russian troops, were also reported.
A body of a civilian man with hands tied behind his back lies in the street as a communal worker prepares a plastic body bag to carry him to a waiting car in town of Bucha, not far from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on April 3, 2022. – Britain, France, Germany, the US and NATO all voiced horror at Ukrainian reports on April 2, 2022, of nearly 300 bodies lying in the street in Bucha, with some appearing to have been bound by their hands and feet before being shot. (Photo by Sergei SUPINSKY / AFP) (Photo by SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)
“We want you to show the world what happened here. What the Russian military did. What the Russian Federation did in peaceful Ukraine. It was important for you to see that these were civilians,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on April 4 while visiting Bucha with journalists.
Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said that the most civilian victims in the Kyiv region were found in Borodyanka, a town of 12,5000 further northwest of Bucha, but without providing figure for the number of deaths.
Putin ordered an all-out invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 as part of a war he has waged on the country since 2014 when Russian forces seized the Ukrainian Crimean Peninsula and occupied parts of the two easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
