Ukraine: Zelensky calls on the UN to act immediately against "Russian war crimes"

Europe 1 with AFP 07h20, April 06, 2022

THE ESSENTIAL

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday urged the UN to act "immediately" against Russia in view of its "war crimes" committed according to him in Ukraine, calling in particular for its exclusion from the Security Council, while Moscow rejects any accusation of atrocities.

After the shock wave caused by the discovery last weekend of numerous corpses in Boutcha, near kyiv, where Ukraine accuses the Russians of massacres, the European Union and Washington have intensified their economic and diplomatic pressure against the Russia in the hope of getting him to let go.

"Now we need Security Council decisions for peace in Ukraine," Volodymyr Zelensky said in a solemn speech by video broadcast live in the hall of the institution in New York.

He asked the UN to hold Russia "responsible" for its "war crimes" perpetrated according to him in Ukraine since its invasion on February 24.

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For this, he added, Russia must be excluded from the Security Council, of which it is one of the five permanent members with the right of veto, or the UN system must be reformed so that "the right of veto does not does not mean the right to kill".

The Ukrainian president then had a video broadcast to the Security Council showing very raw images of people killed in Ukraine.

People "were killed in their apartment, their house... civilians were crushed by tanks while they were sitting in their car in the middle of the road", described Volodymyr Zelensky.

"They cut limbs, slit throats, raped and killed women in front of their children."

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke directly to Russians on Tuesday, telling them in a video that they deserved to know "the truth" about atrocities committed in Ukraine after the Russian invasion, stressing in particular that the abuses attributed to Russians in Boutcha had "horrified the world".

Moscow denies it and accuses the Ukrainian authorities of preparing "stagings" of civilians killed in several cities to condemn the Kremlin.

The head of Russian diplomacy Sergei Lavrov estimated Tuesday evening that the discovery of corpses in Boutcha was a "provocation" aimed at derailing the ongoing negotiations between kyiv and Moscow.

New reports are emerging from Ukraine that several localities have suffered worse acts than Boucha.

"Butcha is not the worst," Oleksiy Arestovitch, an adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, told YouTube.

"Anyone who has been to Borodianka says it's even worse."

"War Chest" 

After France and Germany on Monday, Italy, Spain and Slovenia in turn expelled Russian diplomats en masse on Tuesday, marking a further deterioration in relations with Moscow after the discovery of dozens of corpses near kyiv.

In total, nearly 200 Russian diplomats were expelled from Europe in 48 hours.

On the economic sanctions front, which have rained down on Moscow since its invasion of Ukraine, the US Treasury announced on Tuesday that it no longer allows Russia to repay its debt with dollars held in US banks.

The United States will also adopt on Wednesday, in coordination with the European Union and the G7, new sanctions aimed in particular at prohibiting "any new investment" in Russia, according to a source familiar with the matter.

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The United Kingdom has frozen $350 billion in foreign currency from the Russian regime, President Vladimir Putin's "war chest", British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said on Tuesday in Warsaw.

The European Union has for its part promised new sanctions “this week” against Russia.

The European Commission has proposed that the Twenty-Seven cease their purchases of Russian coal, which represents 45% of EU imports, and that they close their ports to ships operated by Russians.

On Twitter, the head of Ukrainian diplomacy Dmytro Kouleba called on the European Union to impose "the mother of all sanctions" on Moscow in order to "prevent 'new Boutchas'".

"Stop buying oil, gas and coal from Russia. Stop financing Vladimir Putin's war machine," he added.

Vladimir Putin responded by proposing on Tuesday to "monitor" Russian food deliveries to countries "hostile" to the Kremlin.

"Crucial stage" 

In the military theater, explosions were heard Tuesday evening in the small town of Radekhiv, 70 kilometers from Lviv, the large western city, said a local official, without giving further details immediately.

Near kyiv, Russian artillery strikes killed 12 people in the villages of Velyka Dymerka and Bogdanivka, Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office said on Telegram.

Located far from the front, western Ukraine has rarely been the target of bombardments since the start of the Russian invasion.

Following the recent withdrawal of Russian troops besieging kyiv and its region, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg felt that Russia was strengthening itself to "take control of the whole of Donbass", in the east of Ukraine, and build "a land bridge with Crimea", annexed by Moscow in 2014.

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"We are in a crucial phase of the war," he warned, saying he feared the discovery of "other atrocities" attributed to Russian forces in Ukraine.

The Russian army said on Tuesday evening that it had shot down two Ukrainian helicopters seeking to evacuate leaders of a nationalist battalion defending Mariupol (southeast), while once again calling on these defenders to lay down their arms.

Mariupol has "exceeded the stage of a humanitarian catastrophe", Vadim Boïtchenko, the mayor of this large port besieged by the Russian army, told AFP earlier today, describing the situation of some 120,000 inhabitants as "unbearable". on the spot.

The city, which had nearly half a million inhabitants before the war, is "90% destroyed", Vadim Boïtchenko announced on Monday.

Humanitarian disaster overtaken 

France announced Tuesday evening that it would offer financial and human resources to support investigations into the massacres attributed to Russian forces in Ukraine, after an interview between President Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelensky.

For the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "all signs point to the fact that the victims (of Boutcha) were deliberately targeted and killed directly. And this evidence is very disturbing".

Satellite images of the city released by US firm Maxar Technologies on Monday also appear to refute Russian claims that the bodies of people in civilian clothes found in Boutcha were placed there after Russian troops evacuated the area.

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Zelensky calls on the UN to hold Russia "responsible" for "war crimes"

AFP saw the bodies of at least 22 people wearing civilian clothes in the streets of Boutcha on Saturday.

According to the mayor of the city Anatoly Fedoruk, 280 people had to be buried there by the Ukrainians in recent days in "mass graves".

According to the latest count from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 4.24 million Ukrainian refugees have fled their country since February 24, the highest in Europe since the Second World War.

The war in Ukraine is impacting 74 developing countries, affecting 1.2 billion people "particularly vulnerable to soaring food, energy and fertilizer prices", the UN secretary-general said on Tuesday. Antonio Guterres.