Kyiv: The US and Europe were planning to slap fresh sanctions on Tuesday as Ukraine revised its civilian death toll. After the Ukrainian Army region gained control of territories around its capital city, Russian forces have shifted focus on Eastern Ukraine. Enemy forces withdrawing from the capital and its neighbouring regions left a trail of dead bodies scattered on the streets of Bucha, which the President has called the “Massacre’. According to sources, Zelensky visited the doomed town wearing body armour along with security personnel on Monday. Zelensky is scheduled to address a UN council meeting on Tuesday that would consider Ukraine’s allegations of the murder of civilians by the Russians.
In response, US Prez Biden titled his Russian counterpart- ‘a war criminal’ and called for a war crimes trial and more sanctions as global outrage over claims of civilian killings by enemies in the Ukraine town of Bucha mounted. “We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to continue to fight, and we have to get all the detail [to] have a war crimes trial. This guy is brutal and what’s happening in Bucha is outrageous,” he said on Monday.
Moscow responding to the claims – warned of a symmetrical response to Western countries as the expulsion of Russian diplomats paced up.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk which have been reporting escalating assaults recorded fierce fights along the new front between Ukraine and the Donbas region — Verkhnotoretske, a village in Donetsk. This area is just ahead of Gorlovka, which has already been completely taken over by Russian forces. In Verkhnotoretske, destroyed armoured vehicles and artillery carriers were seen. The area was in ruins with nearby houses and a school had been completely destroyed due to the intense shelling and bombing.
Sirens have been activated in the Cherkasy, Chernivtsi, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kharkiv, Khmelnytsky, Kirovohrad, Lviv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Poltava, Rivne, Sumy, Ternopil, Vinnytsia, Volyn, Zakarpattya, Zaporizhzhia, Zhytomyr oblasts and in Kyiv.