KYIV, April 14 (NNN-AGENCIES) — War crimes prosecutors visiting the site of civilian killings called Ukraine a “crime scene”, as tens of thousands of Ukrainians fled their country in advance of a fresh assault to the east.
The visit by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor to Bucha — the Kyiv suburb now synonymous with scores of atrocities against civilians discovered in areas abandoned by Russian forces — came as the new front of the
war shifts eastward, with new allegations of crimes inflicted on locals.
“Ukraine is a crime scene,” the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, told reporters in Bucha. The Hague-based court investigates and prosecutes war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
“We’re here because we have reasonable grounds to believe that crimes within the jurisdiction of the court are being committed,” said Khan, promising to “follow the evidence” as forensic teams began their work.
To the south, Ukrainian forces struggled to hold the key strategic port of Mariupol Wednesday as artillery pounded the battered and besieged city that has been cut off from the rest of the country since early March and where Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky has estimated “tens of thousands” of civilian deaths.
Russia’s defence ministry said Wednesday that 1,026 Ukrainian soldiers from the 36th Marine Brigade had surrendered in Mariupol, including 162 officers. Ukraine has not confirmed the claim.
Following its pullback earlier this month from areas north of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, Russia is refocusing its efforts eastward, the new frontline of the nearly seven-week war.
It appears aimed at capturing more territory in Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists control the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, to create a solid southern corridor — including the port of Mariupol — to occupied Crimea.
As Zelensky warned “the whole of Eastern Europe” was at risk if Europe wasted time in stopping Moscow, the Polish and Baltic presidents visited Ukraine in a show of support, while Britain said it had slapped sanctions on Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine and additional oligarchs.
Britain said it would sanction 178 Russian separatists, including the two “self-styled” leaders of the Russia-backed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and six more oligarchs and their families.
Meanwhile, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said Russia had engaged in “clear patterns of international humanitarian law violations” in Ukraine.
The report by the world’s largest security body covered the period from Russia’s Feb 24 invasion through April 1, before the discovery of hundreds of bodies in Bucha and elsewhere.
In a desperate attempt to flee what Ukrainian authorities warn will be a bloody new clash in the east, more than 40,000 people fled the country in the past 24 hours, the United Nations said Wednesday, bringing to 4.6 million the number of people who have fled since the conflict began.
Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Russian forces around Zaporizhzhia in the south were blocking buses transporting the evacuated, while shooting at fleeing civilians in Lugansk.
Underscoring the risk to civilians, Ukrainian prosecutors on Wednesday accused Russian troops of shooting six men and one woman the day before in a residential home in the occupied southern village of Pravdyne.
Meanwhile, seven civilians were killed by Russian shelling in the northeastern Kharkiv region in the past 24 hours, regional governor Oleg Synegubov said on social media.
Even as the military focus shifted eastward, the grim work of accounting for the civilian dead continued in areas recently abandoned by Russia’s army.
North of Bucha in the town of Gostomel, locals exhumed the body of Mayor Yuriy Prylypko, who authorities said was shot while “handing out bread to the hungry and medicine to the sick” and hastily buried by a local priest.
Up to 400 people are unaccounted for in Gostomel, said regional prosecutor Andiy Tkach.
Meanwhile, an official in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro said Wednesday the remains of more than 1,500 Russian soldiers were being kept in its morgues. — NNN-AGENCIES
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