Kyiv: Entering the 40th day of the war, Ukraine reported the withdrawal of Russian forces from Kyiv and Cheriniv claiming full control of the two hamlets. Ukraine began investigating the war crimes after bodies bound by ropes were found on the streets of towns neighbouring Kyiv.
On Sunday, Ukraine recovered around 410 civilian bodies, a day after, it recaptured select areas giving harrowing accounts of how Russian troops shot and killed civilians without any apparent reason. According to locals, Russian soldiers would go from building to building, take people out of the basements where they were hiding, check their phones for evidence of anti-Russian activity and take them away or shoot them.
The Ukrainian defence accused Moscow of a ‘deliberate Massacre; in the town of Bucha, 30 km northwest of the capital city. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed Russian forces as “murderers”, “torturers” and “rapists” after hundreds of bodies of Ukrainian civilians were found on the streets of towns surrounding Kyiv. He also vowed to investigate and prosecute all Russian “crimes” in Ukraine, saying he had created a “special mechanism” to do so. In a US television interview, Zelensky hat there are more than 100 nationalities in Ukraine and “this is about the destruction and extermination of all these nationalities. We are citizens of Ukraine and we don’t want to be subdued to the policy of Russian Federation.”
World leaders condemned the killing and called for stringent sanctions and investigations of alleged war crimes.
As per the reports furnished by the UN, 7 died and 34 were injured in a Russian firing in Kharkiv residential area. In Mariupol and Irpin, around 1,417 civilians were killed it added saying that 2,038 were injured as Moscow escalated its assault.