Volodymyr Zelensky said Vladimir Putin is trying to turn Ukraine into a country of "silent slaves" as he urged the UN Security Council to oust Russia from the key international body.
In a historic address to the UN Security Council, the Ukrainian President described the death and destruction left behind in the "recently liberated" city of Bucha, where he said Russia troops had "pulled out" people's tongues, raped women in front of their children and dumped bodies in drains.
Comparing Putin's troops to the terrorist group ISIS, he said there was “not a single crime that they would not commit” and called on the UN to block Russia from undermining the Security Council.
In the emotionally charged speech, Ukraine's wartime leader said the horrors uncovered in Bucha may just be the beginning, with "war crimes" likely to have been repeated in the besieged cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv.
“The massacre in our city of Bucha is unfortunately only one of many examples of what the occupiers have been doing on our land for the past 41 days, and there are many similar cities, similar places, where the world has yet to learnt he full truth… dozens of other Ukrainians communities, each of them similar to Bucha," the Ukriainan leader said.
He said Russian troops had killed entire families and tried to burn their bodies, and that people were shot in the street or thrown into wells.
People had their tongues “pulled out only because the aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear from them”, Mr Zelensky said, adding: “This is no different from other terrorists such as Daesh who occupy some territories, and here it is done by a member of the United Nations Security Council.”
He said: “They support hatred at the level of the state and seek to export it to other countries through their system of propaganda and political corruption.”
He also told the UN that Russia’s forces were engaged in “widescale looting” from food to gold earrings “pulled out and covered with blood”.
But Mr Zelensky also challenged the UN's delegates in New York to back immediate reforms to deal with Russian aggression.
As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia has a veto with which it is able to block attempts to censure the Kremlin.
“This undermines the whole architecture of global security, it allows them to go unpunished so they are destroying everything that they can,” he said.
Ukrainian president Mr Zelensky said: “Russia’s leadership feels like colonisers in ancient times, they need our wealth, our people – Russia has already deported hundreds of thousands of our citizens to their country, they abducted more than 2,000 children.”
Zelensky suggested that the safety which was supposed to be guaranteed by the existence of the UN Security Council had not materialised.
The Ukrainian president said: “So where is the security that the Security Council needs to guarantee? It’s not there.
“Although there is a Security Council and so where is the peace?”
Mr Zelensky told the meeting: “It is obvious that the key institution of the world which must ensure the coercion of any aggressor to peace simply cannot work effectively.”
It marks the Ukraine President's first address to the Security Council, with members including Russia and China, and comes a day after he visited Bucha to witness the fall-out.
The Ukrainian leader accused Moscow of committing “real genocide”, as he appeared visibly emotional, flanked by his soldiers and wearing a bullet-proof vest.
Police and other investigators walked the silent streets of Bucha on Tuesday, taking notes on bodies.
Associated Press journalists in the town counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes. Many appeared to have been shot at close range, and some had their hands bound or their flesh burned. A mass grave in a churchyard held bodies wrapped in plastic.
The Kremlin denounced the images as fake and suggested the scenes were staged by the Ukrainians, but high-resolution satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed that many of the bodies had been lying in the open for weeks, during the time Russian forces were in the town.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken said the images from Bucha revealed “a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities”. He said the reports were “more than credible” and the US and other countries will seek to hold the culprits accountable.
As western leaders condemned the killings in Bucha, Italy, Spain and Denmark expelled dozens of Russian diplomats, following moves by Germany and France. Hundreds of Russian diplomats have been sent home since the start of the invasion, many accused of being spies.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the expulsions a “short-sighted” measure that would complicate communication and warned they would be met with “reciprocal steps”.
In another show of support, the European Union ’s executive branch proposed a ban on coal imports from Russia, in what would be the first sanctions from the bloc targeting the country’s lucrative energy industry over the war. The coal imports amount to an estimated 4 billion euros (£3.3 billion) per year.
