Last week Joe Biden directly accused his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, of being a “war criminal.” This Monday, as the scenario that the Russian soldiers left behind after evacuating the town of Bucha in the face of the Ukrainian advance is becoming known, the US president has publicly requested that Putin be put on trial for the aforementioned “war crimes” .
“I already said that I thought he is a war criminal, now we have to bring him to trial,” Biden said in a quick conversation with journalists this Monday.
The president said he will seek further sanctions after learning of reports of atrocities in Ukraine. “They saw what happened in Bucha,” Biden stressed. “I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it: [Putin] he is a war criminal.”
Biden made the comments after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited Bucha, one of the towns around kyiv, where the Ukrainian military has found the bodies of hundreds of dead civilians in the streets, executed with a shot to the back of the head and with handguns. hands tied behind their backs.
This led the Ukrainian leader to call such acts “genocide” and to call for the West to implement tougher sanctions against Moscow. «Russian soldiers are butchers”said Zelensky, who reported that Bucha was occupied by a special unit of the Russian military, the 17th Infantry Unit, led by Lieutenant Colonel Urbekov.
Moscow has emphatically denied the atrocities and said the deaths occurred after its troops left the town.
One of the darkest scenarios was what happened in the gardens of the main Orthodox church. According to Pope Maxim Andreev, the dead around the church were so many that they had to be buried in a mass grave in the grounds of the compound.
“They are going to stay here for now, but they will have to be unearthed in a while because most have not been identified. The elders have told me that this was only seen around here during World War II during the Nazi occupation,” the prelate told the British channel SkyNews.
Meanwhile, the bodies of some 410 civilians have been removed from towns around kyiv that were recently retaken by the Ukrainians, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said. AP journalists saw the bodies of at least 21 people at various posts around Bucha, northwest of the capital.
The situation around kyiv, in Bucha in particular, has sparked international outrage with Western leaders calling for investigations of war crimes and increased sanctions against Russia.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed the footage was “fake,” “not a single local resident suffered from violent actions” during the occupation of Bucha, it said.
State Department spokesman Ned Price went further than Biden in hinting that additional action against Russia would be taken “very soon.”
Rape, summary execution and unrestrained violence are some of the war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Russian forces against civilians in the occupied areas of the Chernihiv, Kharkiv and kyiv regions, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The human rights group said in a statement which has documented allegations of war crimes. “They include a case of repeated rape; two cases of summary execution, one of six men, the other of one man; and other cases of unlawful violence and threats against civilians between February 27 and March 14, 2022.”
“Soldiers were also implicated in the looting of civilian property, including food, clothing and firewood. Those who committed these abuses are responsible for war crimes,” he added. But these details could not be independently verified.
“The cases we document amount to deliberate and unspeakable cruelty and violence against Ukrainian civilians,” Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director for HRW, said in the statement. “Rape, murder and other violent acts against people in the custody of Russian forces must be investigated as war crimes.”
