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BUCHA \u2014 Moscow faced global revulsion and accusations of war crimes Monday 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.<\/p>\n
The grisly images of battered bodies out in the open or in hastily dug graves led to calls for tougher sanctions against the Kremlin, namely a cutoff of fuel imports from Russia. Germany reacted by expelling 40 Russian diplomats, and Lithuania threw out its Russian ambassador.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy left the capital, Kyiv, for his first reported trip since the war began nearly six weeks ago to see for himself what he called the \u201cgenocide\u201d and \u201cwar crimes\u201d in the town of Bucha, the site of some of the horrors.<\/p>\n
\u201cDead people have been found in barrels, basements, strangled, tortured,\u201d said Zelenskyy, who again called on Russia to move quickly to negotiate an end to the war.<\/p>\n
European leaders and the United Nations human rights chief condemned the bloodshed, some of them also branding it genocide, and U.S. President Joe Biden said Russian President Vladimir Putin should face a war crimes trial.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis guy is brutal, and what\u2019s happening in Bucha is outrageous,\u201d said Biden, who also promised to increase sanctions against Moscow.<\/p>\n
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed the scenes outside Kyiv as a \u201cstage-managed anti-Russian provocation.\u201d Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the images contained \u201csigns of video forgery and various fakes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Russia similarly rejected previous allegations of atrocities as fabrications on Ukraine\u2019s part.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian officials said the bodies of 410 civilians were found in towns around Kyiv that were recaptured from Russian forces in recent days.<\/p>\n
In Bucha, northwest of the capital, Associated Press journalists saw 21 bodies, including a group of nine in civilian clothes who appeared to have been shot at close range. At least two had their hands tied behind their backs. A bag of groceries was spilled by one of the dead.<\/p>\n
The full extent of the bloodshed in the Kyiv area has yet to emerge. By all accounts, the horrors in the shattered southern port city of Mariupol are likely to be far worse.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a war of murders, a lot of blood. A lot of civilians are dying,\u201d said Natalia Svitlova, a refugee from Dnipro in eastern Ukraine who fled to Poland. \u201cI don\u2019t understand why this is possible in the 21st century and why no one can stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moscow continued to press its offensive in eastern Ukraine, where little news has made it to the outside world since the war began Feb. 24. Russia, in withdrawing from the capital area in recent days after being thwarted in its bid to capture Kyiv, has said its main focus now is gaining control the Donbas, the largely Russian-speaking industrial region in the country\u2019s east that includes Mariupol.<\/p>\n
About two-thirds of the Russian troops around Kyiv have now left and are either in Belarus or on their way there, probably getting more supplies and reinforcements, said a senior U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an intelligence assessment.<\/p>\n
Russian forces also appear to be repositioning artillery and troops to try to take the city of Izyum, which lies on a key route to the Donbas, the official said.<\/p>\n
European allies, though united in outrage over the aftermath outside Kyiv, appeared split on how to respond.<\/p>\n
Poland, which is on Ukraine\u2019s border and has taken in large numbers of refugees, angrily singled out France and Germany for not taking tougher action and urged Europe to quickly wean itself off Russian energy. But Germany said it would stick with a more gradual approach of phasing out coal and oil imports over the next several months.<\/p>\n
Western and Ukrainian leaders have accused Russia of war crimes before, and the International Criminal Court\u2019s prosecutor has already opened an investigation. But the latest reports ratcheted up the condemnation.<\/p>\n
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said \u201cthe Russian authorities are responsible for these atrocities, committed while they had effective control of the area.\u201d<\/p>\n
French President Emmanuel Macron said there is \u201cclear evidence of war crimes\u201d in Bucha that demand new punitive measures. \u201cI\u2019m in favor of a new round of sanctions and in particular on coal and gasoline. We need to act,\u201d he said on France-Inter radio.<\/p>\n
But Poland\u2019s prime minister, who described Russia under Putin as a \u201ctotalitarian-fascist state,\u201d called for actions \u201cthat will finally break Putin\u2019s war machine.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWould you negotiate with Hitler, with Stalin, with Pol Pot?\u201d Mateusz Morawiecki asked of Macron.<\/p>\n
In announcing Germany\u2019s expulsion of Russian diplomats, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the images from Bucha reveal the \u201cunbelievable brutality of the Russian leadership and those who follow its propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe must fear similar images from many other places occupied by Russian troops in Ukraine,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
The U.S. and its allies have sought to punish Russia for the invasion by imposing sweeping sanctions but fear further harm to the global economy, which is still recovering from the pandemic. Europe is in a particular bind, since it gets 40% of its gas and 25% of its oil from Russia.<\/p>\n
Putin\u2019s Feb. 24 invasion has left thousands of people dead and forced more than 4 million Ukrainians to flee their country.
\n\u201cThe horrors that we\u2019ve seen in Bucha are just the tip of the iceberg of all the crimes that have been committed by the Russian army on the territory of Ukraine so far,\u201d Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I can tell you without exaggeration but with great sorrow that the situation in Mariupol is much worse compared to what we\u2019ve seen in Bucha and other cities, towns, and villages nearby Kyiv.\u201d<\/p>\n
Putin has said the invasion is aimed at eliminating a security threat on Russia\u2019s doorstep and has demanded that Ukraine drop its bid to join NATO. Ukraine insists it never posed any threat but has offered to declare itself neutral.<\/p>\n
Britain\u2019s Defense Ministry said Russia continues to flood soldiers and mercenaries into the Donbas. It said Russian troops are still trying to take Mariupol, which has seen weeks of heavy fighting and some of the worst suffering of the war.<\/p>\n
(AP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BUCHA \u2014 Moscow faced global revulsion and accusations of war crimes Monday 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 out in the open or in hastily dug graves led to calls for tougher sanctions against the Kremlin, namely a cutoff of fuel imports from Russia. Germany reacted by expelling 40 Russian diplomats, and Lithuania threw out its Russian ambassador. Ukrainian President…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":606874,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47748],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-606873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}