President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russian troops of committing terrible war crimes after World War 2 in an address to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday as outrage and revulsion swept through Western capitals at what appeared to be incontrovertible evidence of a grisly civilian massacre in Ukrainian areas recently vacated by Russia.
The scenario
Bucha is a town located about 25 km to the northwest of the capital with an estimated population of around 36,000 before the invasion began.
More than 300 bodies have been found in the town that Zelensky visited on Monday, some with their hands bound, flesh burned, and shot in the back of their head.
Until Tuesday afternoon. Officials had counted bodies of at least 410 civilians in towns around Kyiv, where Russian and Ukrainian forces battled from around February 27th until the beginning of April when, as the invaders withdraw evidence of lightly war crimes began to emerge.
Satellite images from mid-March that are now available show streets strewn with corpses and many of the bodies seen by journalists in the past couple of days appear to have been lying in open for weeks.
Corpses have been found in a shallow mass grave in a church compound, and officials have said five bodies with their hands laying in the basement of a children’s sanatorium that was used by the occupiers as a torture chamber for civilians.
Barbaric activities similar to WWII
The discoveries have drawn comparisons with the killing of civilians in this area during World War II. Between the first Battle of Kyiv (Part of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union that began in June 1941) and the Second Battle of Kyiv (November-December 1943) when the Red Army started to push back the Germans from Ukraine.
The area around the Ukrainian capital including Bucha saw the “Holocaust by bullets” during which an estimated 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were shot dead at close range.
residents told Human Rights Watch that Russian soldiers went from door to door, questioning people, looting their possessions and Russian armed vehicle allegedly fired arbitrarily into buildings.
Genocide or war crime?
War crimes are defined as grave breaches of the Geneva Convention agreement signed after World War Two that laid down international humanitarian laws during wartime and deliberately targeted civilians amounts to war crimes.
Both expressions have been used freely in outraged Ukrainian and Western descriptions of the atrocities in Bucha.
Whether these incidents fit those definitions is important because of the international community’s obligation to respond to him. Ukraine and the West have accused Russia of war crimes, even order alleging that it targeted civilians in the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol and a theater that announced it was sheltering children.
Genocide is seen as the gravest of all crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide as defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention of December 1948, includes acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.
Response
All of Ukraine’s western allies, the European Union, NATO, and the United Nations Secretary-general have strongly condemned the massacre and butcher
Amid calls for stronger sanctions against Russia, countries like Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden have expelled dozens of Russian diplomats with Swedish prosecutors and have opened a preliminary investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine.
Russia has denied all accusations about Bucha, the Kremlin said that the claims showing out of puja were a well-directed but tragic show and a monstrous forgery to denigrate the Russian army. Kremlin also called for the Russian diplomat’s expulsion from other countries as short-sighted and said reciprocal steps could follow.
Published By – Damandeep Singh
Edited By-Kritika Kashyap
