Category Archives: Russia

The bodies of Bucha have set a difficult test for the west

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Analysis: From Ukraine’s point of view, this has to be the time to pile pressure on Germany in particular

Sometimes a war crime is so egregious, and so fully reported, that it cannot but stir the conscience of the west. The My Lai massacre in 1968, Srebrenica in 1995, the British suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, the Rwanda genocide of 1994, the Disappeared of Argentina under the junta in the 1980s or even the dispatches about bodies piled high in Bulgarian town squares by the US war reporter Januarius MacGahan in 1876 were all moments when the defence of ignorance has to be abandoned.

Even then the truth is more complicated and the west did not always act. Bill Clinton regretted he did not respond to the murders of Tutsis in 1994, saying he did not “fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror”. Srebrenica was arguably only the culmination of ethnic cleansing that had been going on for three years. My Lai, revealed two years after the event, only provided further momentum to a pre-existing US anti-war movement. The scale of the British repression of the Mau Mau rebellion was only truly documented decades afterwards by a Harvard historian Caroline Elkins in her book Britain’s Gulag.

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Sanctions on Russia must stay till all troops leave Ukraine, says Liz Truss

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Foreign secretary in discussions with Ukrainian foreign minister about intensifying sanctions after atrocities in Bucha

The West must not lift sanctions against Russia until all its troops have left Ukraine and Vladimir Putin is unable to mount such an offensive again, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has said.

She was speaking alongside the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, in Warsaw, where the two discussed how to step up sanctions against Russia to the maximum in the wake of the alleged war crimes revealed in Bucha.

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Routing of Russian forces from Kyiv area will be hard to repeat in eastern Ukraine

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Analysis: while Ukrainian troops have strong defensive positions in Donbas they lack the capability to force out the invaders

Russia’s withdrawal from around Kyiv and the north and north-east of Ukraine appears more comprehensive than most onlookers had anticipated. It will be a little while before the picture becomes definitive, but Moscow’s forces are now fast retreating out of the country from the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy districts, Ukrainian regional officials say.

It is impossible to describe this as anything other than a serious reverse. Such is the haste of the exit that some units are being left behind to be mopped up by the Ukrainians. Sumy, a little over 30km from the Russian border, did not fall to the invaders, while the road to Chernihiv, which was at risk of encirclement, is now open to the capital to the south-west.

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Russia-Ukraine war latest: Biden calls for Putin war crimes trial; Borodyanka worse than Bucha, says Ukrainian prosecutor

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US president says Russian president is war criminal; Ukraine’s prosecutor general says Borodyanka will be worst-hit by Russian invasion in Kyiv region

Before I hand this liveblog over to my colleague, Martin Belam, here is a quick refresher of where the situation currently stands.

In the light of heinous provocation of Ukrainian radicals in Bucha Russia requested a meeting of UN Security Council on Monday April 4.”

Russian Federation requested a meeting of the UN Security Council in connection with the provocation of the Ukrainian military and radicals in the city of Bucha.

The idea behind the next crime of the ‘Kyiv’s regime’ is the disruption of peace negotiations and the escalation of violence.”

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Russia now synonymous with Bucha killings, says Zelenskiy

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Ukraine president says worse atrocities may yet be found elsewhere as satellite images show mass grave near church in Bucha

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said that Russia’s public image is now one of torture and execution after the retreat of Russian forces in the town of Bucha led to the discovery of the killing of hundreds of civilians.

Calling Russian soldiers “murderers”, “butchers” and “rapists”, Zelenskiy said late on Sunday: “your culture and human appearance perished together with the Ukrainian men and women”. He warned that “even worse things” may be found in other occupied regions.

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‘Massacre of innocents’: how the papers covered Russia’s atrocities in Bucha

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Accusations of war crimes and calls for tougher sanctions feature on Monday’s front pages amid horror at civilian killings by Russian troops

  • Warning: this story contains images some readers may find distressing

Revulsion at the atrocities committed by Russian forces in the Ukrainian town of Bucha dominates today’s front pages, as politicians lined up around the world to condemn the massacre of hundreds of civilians.

The Mirror says simply “Genocide” in its headline under the bleak strapline: “Putin’s latest atrocities”. It quotes Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s use of the term but the page is given over to a heartbreaking image from Bucha, just near Ukraine’s capital, where the bodies of civilians were abandoned in the street. Hundreds of civilians have been found in mass graves, it reports, and some had been tied up.

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Blinken: growing evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine a ‘punch to the gut’

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Secretary of state promises US will join allies in documenting atrocities and hold perpetrators accountable

Growing evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine are “a punch to the gut”, the US secretary of state Antony Blinken said on Sunday, promising that America would join its allies in documenting the atrocities to hold the perpetrators accountable.

A retreat of Russian forces around Kyiv has revealed evidence of atrocities against civilians as Ukrainian troops and journalists have moved back into a broad swathe of suburbs and towns around the capital.

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Killing of civilians in Bucha and Kyiv condemned as ‘terrible war crime’

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Europe pledges further sanctions against Russia after reports of killing of scores of unarmed Ukrainians

Russia stands accused of “terrible” war crimes, as western leaders condemned the killings of unarmed civilians in Bucha and the surrounding areas of Kyiv in alleged atrocities that prompted fresh demands for tougher action against Moscow.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the Kremlin-ordered attack on his country amounted to genocide, after local officials reported scores of civilians had been killed in the towns of Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel near the capital following the withdrawal of Russian forces.

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Russian missiles strike fuel depot in key Ukraine port of Odesa

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Officials say no casualties reported after attack, while evidence of war crimes around Kyiv mounts in wake of Russian withdrawal

Russian airstrikes have hit “critical infrastructure” in the Ukrainian city of Odesa as evidence of horrific war crimes in areas around Kyiv where Russian troops have pulled back continued to mount.

Odesa, an important port on the Black Sea coast and the main base for Ukraine’s navy, had largely been spared violence in the five-week-old conflict until the attacks early on Sunday.

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‘It was like a movie’: recaptured Bucha recounts violence of Russian invasion

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Claims of war crimes in the Ukraine city mount up as residents tell of a month of fear

It was, said Taras Schevchenko, like a scene from a film.

At 6am on the morning of 24 February, from the vantage point of the kitchen window of his fifth-storey apartment overlooking Gostomel airport, on the northern outskirts of the Ukrainian town of Bucha, Schevchenko watched as about 20 Russian helicopters flew into vision, spilling paratroopers on to the tarmac below.

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Minister rules out energy rationing in UK despite Ukraine crisis

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Grant Shapps says invasion is ‘wake-up call’ but onshore wind plan seems to have been scaled down

A cabinet minister has rejected calls for the UK to consider rationing energy, as a plan to drastically increase onshore wind power also appeared to be significantly scaled back.

The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had been a “massive wake-up call” for western nations about their dependence on imported oil and gas, which European countries are now trying to wean themselves off.

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Red is dead: Russian anti-war protesters fly a new flag for peace

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Seeing the tricolour as tainted, they took the ‘blood’ out to leave blue and white, then found others had done so too

• Russia-Ukraine war: latest developments

When Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine, anti-war Russians such as Kai Katonina, a 31-year-old designer who lives in Berlin, joined protests around the world. Katonina held up a sign that read “No to war”, but few in the crowd knew that they (Katonina’s preferred pronoun) were Russian.

They said: “Onlookers thought we were Ukrainians because our people look the same. It was crucial for us to stand apart and show that Russians also oppose the war. We needed to identify ourselves.”

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Zelenskiy vows to investigate and prosecute all Russian ‘crimes’ in Ukraine – as it happened

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This live blog is now closed. Read the latest live developments in the Russia-Ukraine war here.

Russian chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky has said Russia’s position on Crimea and Donbas remains unchanged and that peace talks had not progressed enough for a leaders’ meeting.

Medinsky’s comments appear to be a rebuttal of earlier reports suggesting Moscow had “verbally” agreed to key Ukrainian proposals.

A Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia told media on Saturday that Russia had “given an official answer to all positions, which is that they accept the (Ukrainian) position, except for the issue of Crimea (which was annexed by Russia in 2014).”

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‘They were all shot’: Russia accused of war crimes as Bucha reveals horror of invasion

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Ukrainian forces liberating the town near Kyiv find streets littered with corpses of civilians and burned-out Russian tanks

See all our coverage of the Ukraine war

The retreat of Russian forces around Kyiv has left horrifying evidence of atrocities against civilians littered across the region’s suburbs and towns, turned into hellish war zones by Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

As Ukrainian armoured columns rolled into Bucha, a town north-west of the capital, they found streets blocked by burned-out Russian tanks and military vehicles, and strewn with the bodies of civilians whom locals said had been killed by the invading forces without provocation.

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‘It is a war crime’: two young boys among neighbours shot dead during attempted evacuation

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Civilians fleeing in cars mown down in the town of Bucha, north-west of Kyiv, where 20 bodies were found on the streets

Halyna Tovkach, 55, is searching for the body of her husband, Oleg, 62. His death, she says, is part of a war crime in which Russian soldiers also killed two young boys and their mother.

The incident is said to have happened at 7.15 on the morning of 5 March in Bucha, a town north-west of Kyiv, when two families who were neighbours on Ivana Rudenka street tried to escape their hell.

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Ukraine claims Russia has ‘verbally’ accepted peace proposals, except on Crimea – as it happened

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Deputy defence minister says territory is ‘liberated from the invader’ as disturbing images in Bucha show bodies had been bound and hooded

At least 158 children have been killed and more than 254 injured in Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion, the country’s office of the prosecutor general has said.

The office said two of the fatalities were among 13 people killed when Russian forces fired at civilian cars on a highway in Chernihiv around 18 March.

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Ukrainian photographer Maksim Levin killed while covering war

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Levin, who worked for Ukrainian news website and contributed to Reuters, found dead in village north of Kyiv

Maksim Levin, a photographer and videographer who was working for a Ukrainian news website and who was a longtime contributor to Reuters, has been killed while covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He leaves behind his wife and four children.

His body was found in a village north of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, on 1 April, the news website LB.ua, where he worked, said on Saturday.

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Ukraine says it has recaptured city of Brovary but warns of mines left by Russians

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Key city east of Kyiv has been liberated, says mayor, as Zelenskiy says Russians withdrawing ‘slowly but noticeably’

A key city east of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, has been recaptured from Russian forces, Ukrainian officials have said, but retreating troops were said to be heavily mining the lost territory in their wake.

The city of Brovary was said by its mayor to have been liberated with Ukrainian forces working to drive out the last Russian troops and clear the area of “military hardware”.

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