BUCHA, Ukraine — EU officials said Monday they were weighing new sanctions targeting
Moscow in response to alleged atrocities against Ukrainian civilians by
Russian forces that sparked a wave of international outrage.
اضافة اعلان
Despite Russian
denials of responsibility, condemnation was swift, with Western leaders,
NATO,
and the UN all voicing horror at images of dead bodies in Bucha, northwest of
Kyiv, and elsewhere.
Local authorities
said they had been forced to dig communal graves to bury the dead accumulating
in the streets, including one in Bucha found with his hands bound behind his
back.
Ukraine’s
President
Volodymyr Zelensky called Russian troops “murderers, torturers,
rapists, looters” and warned in his nightly video message that “concentrated
evil has come to our land”.
EU foreign policy
chief
Josep Borrell said the bloc was urgently discussing a new round of
sanctions as it condemned “atrocities” reported in Ukrainian towns that have
been occupied by troops sent in by Russian President Vladimir Putin five weeks
ago.
The proposals,
which French President Emmanuel Macron said could target Russia’s oil and coal
sectors, could be discussed by foreign ministers on the sidelines of a NATO
meeting on Wednesday and Thursday, or at their regular meeting early next week,
an EU official told AFP.
Borrell also
offered EU assistance in documenting evidence of the alleged atrocities, and
Zelensky said he had created a special body to investigate.
The scale of the
killings is still being pieced together, but Ukrainian prosecutor general
Iryna Venediktova said 410 civilian bodies had been recovered so far.
And Bucha’s mayor
Anatoly Fedoruk told AFP that 280 bodies were placed in mass graves because it
was impossible to bury them in cemeteries still within firing range of Russian
forces.
Satellite imagery
firm Maxar released pictures it said showed a mass grave located on the grounds
of a church in the town.
Municipal worker
Serhii Kaplychnyi told AFP that Russian troops initially refused to allow
residents to bury the dead in Bucha.
“They said while
it was cold to let them lie there.”
Eventually, they
were able to retrieve the bodies, he said. “We dug a mass grave with a tractor
and buried everyone.”
AFP reporters in
the town saw at least 20 bodies, all in civilian clothing, strewn across a
single street.
‘Clear indications
of war crimes’
Zelensky’s spokesman, Sergiy Nikiforov, said the scene in Bucha “looks
exactly like war crimes”.
Moscow rejected
the accusations and suggested the images of corpses were “fakes” while calling
for a
UN Security Council meeting on what its deputy ambassador to the body
called a “heinous provocation of Ukrainian radicals in Bucha”.
“We categorically
reject all allegations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
But Macron said
he was in favor of fresh sanctions since “there are very clear indications of war
crimes. It was the
Russian army that was in Bucha,” he told France Inter radio.
In Germany,
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s defense minister Christine Lambrecht raised the possibility of an end to
gas imports.
“President Putin
and his supporters will feel the consequences,” Scholz said.
Polish Prime Minister
Mateusz Morawiecki, whose country has welcomed millions of Ukrainians
fleeing the violence, called for an international investigation into what he
termed a “genocide.”
The UN’s top
humanitarian envoy Martin Griffiths is expected in Kyiv soon after arriving in
Moscow on Sunday in an attempt to halt the fighting.
Peace talks
are scheduled to resume by video on Monday, though Russia’s chief negotiator
Vladimir Medinsky said it was too early for a top-level meeting between
Zelensky and Putin.
He
said
Kyiv had become “more realistic” in its approach to issues related to the
neutral and non-nuclear status of Ukraine, but a draft agreement for submission
to a summit meeting was not ready.
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