Photograph: Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has given the UN security council a harrowing account of atrocities in his country and demanded that Russian leaders be “brought to justice for war crimes”.
A day after Joe Biden called for Putin to be held to account, Zelenskiy said there should be an international tribunal similar to the Nuremberg trials of Nazis after the second world war.
There has been global revulsion at apparently deliberate civilian killings by Russian troops in Ukraine. Zelenskiy visited the town of Bucha on Monday after officials said the bodies of 410 civilians had been recovered from Kyiv-area towns after Russian troops withdrew.
“There is not a single crime that they would not commit there,” Zelenskiy said via video link and an interpreter. “The Russians searched for and purposely killed anyone who served our country. They shot and killed women outside their houses. They killed entire families – adults and children – and they tried to burn the bodies.”
Zelenskiy spoke of civilians “shot and killed in the back of the head after being tortured. Some of them were shot on the streets; others were thrown into the wells. So they died there in suffering.”
He added: “Civilians were crushed by tanks while sitting in their cars in the middle of the road just for their pleasure.”
The president detailed the alleged brutality of the Russian forces. “They cut off limbs, slashed their throats, women were raped and killed in front of their children. Their tongues were pulled out only because the aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear.”
This was no different, he said, from the behaviour of Islamic State, the terrorist group notorious for its acts of cruelty in Iraq and Syria, but in this instance the perpetrator was Russia, a member of the UN security council. He urged the council to live up to its name. “It is obvious that the key institution of the world which must ensure the coercion of any aggressor to peace simply cannot work effectively.”
Zelenskiy also said Bucha was “only one of many examples of what the occupiers have been doing on our land for the past 41 days” and there were many more that the world had yet to learn the full truth about.
He accused Russia of behaving like an ancient coloniser that was abducting children and looting wealth, including gold earrings ripped from civilians’ ears. “Russia wants to turn Ukraine into silent slaves,” he said.
Zelenskiy added: “The Russian military and those who gave them orders must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes in Ukraine. Anyone who has given criminal orders and carried them out by killing our people will be brought before the tribunal, which should be similar to the Nuremberg tribunal.”
He reminded Russian diplomats that Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign affairs minister in Nazi Germany, had “not escaped punishment for crimes in world war two”. Von Ribbentrop was executed in 1946.
After a brief technical glitch, Zelinskiy played a shocking video that displayed corpses, some charred or dismembered, some lying in streets or mass graves, some belonging to children, followed by the simple message: “#StopRussianAggression.”
Earlier the UN human rights office spokesperson Liz Throssell said “all the signs are” that civilians were “directly targeted and directly killed” in Bucha. “This is extremely disturbing,” she said. “And what we must stress is that under international humanitarian law, the deliberate killing of civilians is a war crime.”
Zelenskiy conceded in a TV interview that negotiations with Russia, which were reportedly continuing on Tuesday by video link, remained the only option. But he said talks were now a “challenge” after the killings, adding that it was possible he and Putin would not personally hold talks.
Images of the corpses of what appear to be civilians shot at close range in the streets of Bucha have prompted international condemnation of Moscow, calls for yet harsher sanctions and demands that those responsible be tried for war crimes.
Russia has denied responsibility, suggesting the images are fake or the deaths occurred after Russian forces pulled out. However, satellite photographs taken before the withdrawal show bodies in some of the same places they were later found.
Responding to Zelenskiy‘s address, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said that while Bucha was under Russian control, “not a single local person has suffered from any violent action.” He claimed that video footage of bodies in the streets was “a crude forgery” staged by the Ukrainians.
Russia’s defence ministry claimed similarly staged “events” had also been “organised by Ukrainian special forces in Sumy, Konotop, and other cities”, while the parliamentary speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said Bucha was “a provocation”, with “Washington and Brussels the screenwriters and directors and Kyiv the actors.”
However, Maxar Technologies satellite imagery of one Bucha street from 19 and 21 March appears to show several bodies in exactly the same position as in video footage and photos taken this weekend in the same street.
A New York Times analysis of closeups of Bucha’s Yablonska Street concluded, after comparing them with video footage from 1 and 2 April, that many corpses had been there since at least three weeks ago, when Russian forces were in control of the town.
Britain’s UN ambassador, Barbara Woodward, called the images from Bucha “harrowing, appalling, probable evidence of war crimes and possibly a genocide” and said the security council needed “to think about how we deal with that”.
Speaking before he headed to Brussels for meetings of Nato and G7 foreign ministers, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said: “What we’ve seen in Bucha is not the random act of a rogue unit. It’s a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities. The reports are more than credible. The evidence is there for the world to see. This reinforces our determination and the determination of countries around the world to make sure that one way or another, one day or another, there is accountability for those who committed these acts, for those who ordered them.”
Peskov said remarks by Biden on Monday calling Putin “a war criminal” and demanding “a war crimes trial” were unacceptable and unworthy of a US president. The White House has also promised fresh sanctions on Moscow this week, and the US is seeking Russia’s suspension from the UN’s human rights council.
As Spain, Italy, Sweden and Denmark joined France and Germany in expelling dozens of Russian diplomats, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, on Tuesday outlined the bloc’s fifth package of sanctions, saying Moscow was waging a “cruel, ruthless war, also against Ukraine’s civilian population”.
The EU would impose an import ban on coal from Russia, a full transaction ban on key Russian banks, a ban on Russian vessels accessing EU ports, and a ban on Russian and Belarusian road transport operators, among other measures, she said.
The EU sanctions did not include cutting off Russian oil and gas imports. Russia supplies about a third of Europe’s gas and several EU countries are still reluctant to impose measures that could touch off a European energy crisis, despite Putin’s efforts to use energy as a lever to fight back against western sanctions.
Europe’s worst conflict in decades, which began with Russia’s invasion on 24 February, has killed 20,000 people, according to Ukrainian estimates. The UN refugee agency has said more than 4.2 million refugees had fled the country, while the International Organization for Migration said nearly 6.5 million people were internally displaced.
