What Happened On Day 39 Of The War In Ukraine
The devastating toll of the war became clearer as Russian forces withdrew from around Kyiv. World leaders promised more sanctions.
Follow the latest developments on the war in Ukraine.
BUCHA, Ukraine — Growing evidence of atrocities against civilians has brought home the horrific toll of the war in Ukraine, prompting world leaders on Sunday to threaten even harsher sanctions, including a lockout of Russia’s vital gas industry, a step some had been loath to take.
In Bucha, a newly liberated suburb northwest of the capital, residents were still finding bodies in yards and roadways days after Russian troops withdrew. A man in a bright blue fleece lay hunched over the steering wheel of a crushed car at an intersection in the center of town. Another man lay on his back beside the road, a large bullet hole in the back of his head and his green bicycle toppled beside him.
But it was the discovery of corpses with their wrists bound, images of which quickly proliferated online, that sparked the most international outrage.
“The Russian authorities will have to answer for these crimes,” said France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, called the actions of the Russian army in Bucha and other towns around Kyiv “acts of genocide.” And António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, expressing “shock” over the images of dead civilians, said: “It is essential that an independent investigation leads to effective accountability.”
Even as Moscow’s troops pulled away from Kyiv, Russia continued to batter Ukraine’s southern coastline with airstrikes on infrastructure Sunday. It has described the withdrawal as a tactical move to regroup its forces for a major push in the Donbas region in the east and south.
Missiles struck the Black Sea port cities of Odesa and Mykolaiv, according to Ukrainian officials, and Ukraine’s air defense southern command said it had intercepted two Russian sea-based cruise missiles. Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed the strikes, saying it had destroyed an oil refinery and three oil depots around Odesa that “were used to resupply Ukrainian military units” near Mykolaiv.
But on Sunday, the world’s attention was focused more on where Russian forces had been than where they were now, with Bucha at the forefront.
As Ukrainian forces swept into the suburb, civilians emerged from basement shelters to a landscape dotted with bodies and the husks of destroyed tanks.
The dead were so numerous that local officials resorted to digging a mass grave outside a church, where a coroner, Serhiy Kaplishny, said about 40 bodies had been deposited during the occupation. In an interview, Mr. Kaplishny said his team had collected more than 100 bodies during and after the fighting, including those of more than a dozen men whose hands had been tied and who had been shot in the head.
Journalists from The New York Times, The Associated Press and other international news outlets arriving in Bucha and nearby towns have also filmed and photographed bodies in civilian clothes scattered in the streets and at least nine lying together in a yard. In several cases, hands were bound behind the back.
The bodies of 410 people who appeared to have been civilians have been recovered from the Kyiv region, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said in a Facebook post on Sunday. The Times was not able to independently verify that figure.
“We are being destroyed and exterminated, and this is happening in the Europe of the 21st century,” Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,”
Russia’s Defense Ministry on Sunday rejected all accusations that its troops had committed atrocities in Bucha, saying that “not a single” civilian had been injured while the town was under Russian control. It said pictures and video footage from the area had been “staged by the Ukrainian government.”
But as evidence of the apparent massacre of civilians mounted, leaders across the world said Moscow was to blame for the violence and should be held accountable.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain condemned “Russia’s despicable attacks against innocent civilians in Irpin and Bucha,” and even Yair Lapid, the foreign minister of Israel, which has been wary of antagonizing Moscow, said it was “impossible to remain indifferent in the face of the horrific images from the city of Bucha.”
“Intentionally harming a civilian population is a war crime and I strongly condemn it,” Mr. Lapid said.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, in an interview on CNN, said the killings should not go unpunished. “We’ve said before Russia’s aggression that we thought it was likely that they would commit atrocities,” Mr. Blinken said, adding: “We can’t become numb to this. We can’t normalize this.”
Outrage over the civilian deaths could move the needle for the European Union, which has so far rebuffed mounting calls from Ukraine, and by President Biden, to impose sanctions on Russian oil and gas, citing its dependency on Russian fuels.
In what would mark a significant shift in her country’s position, Germany’s defense minister, Christine Lambrecht, said that in light of the Bucha atrocities, the bloc should consider banning Russian gas imports. Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, said on Twitter that more European Union sanctions against Russia “are on their way.”
On Sunday, a leading human rights group said it had documented “apparent war crimes” against Ukrainian civilians by Russian forces that had occupied Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Kyiv. Citing interviews with eyewitnesses, victims and local residents, the group, Human Rights Watch, documented a case of a woman who was repeatedly raped, as well as two summary killings and other episodes of violence against civilians.
The report painted a grueling picture of brutality in Bucha even before the accounts that emerged from there after Russian forces withdrew.
One eyewitness cited in the report described an execution in early March, in which Russian soldiers forced five men to kneel on a roadside and pull their shirts over their heads before shooting one of them in the head.
“The cases that we documented are corroborated by these recent allegations,” said Yulia Gorbunova, the author of the Human Rights Watch report, referring to the recent reports circulating from Bucha. “What is emerging now, if confirmed, is quite horrendous and gives an indication of the scale of these atrocities,” she said.
War crimes cases can be brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, but successful prosecution is a steep climb, experts say.
“It would likely be difficult to prove in court,’’ said David Scheffer, an international law expert. “The circumstances are unknown. Who executed them. Who bound their hands. This would require a very difficult and detailed investigation.’’
“This is very different from a military strike on a city,’’ he said.
Accusations can also be brought before the International Court of Justice, but the United Nations Security Council would be responsible for enforcing any ruling against Russia; as one of five permanent members of the Security Council, Russia would have veto power over any decision.
The Russian government has consistently denied claims that its forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine, even as reports emerged of mass casualties from the bombing of a maternity ward and theater in Mariupol. In occupied Bucha, the Russian defense ministry said in a statement residents “could freely move around the town” and were allowed to leave.
“This is another provocation,” the ministry said of the new reports of atrocities.
But the accounts from Ukraine and the grisly images may spur additional military aid to Ukraine, aside from more punishment on Russia.
American lawmakers said the reports from Bucha justified further assistance to Ukraine, with some calling for the provision of more surface-to-air missiles to help Ukrainian forces. “We need to do more to help Ukraine, and we need to do more quickly,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio.
In the besieged port city of Mariupol, residents were still awaiting the arrival of an aid convoy that has been trying to reach them since Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Sunday. Late Thursday, Russia announced a cease-fire to allow for evacuations out of Mariupol, but humanitarian efforts to reach the city have stalled repeatedly.
Carlotta Gall and Andrew E. Kramer reported from Bucha, and Natalie Kitroeff from Mexico City. Reporting was contributed by Ivan Nechepurenko from Istanbul; Cora Engelbrecht from Krakow, Poland; Jane Arraf from Lviv, Ukraine; Cassandra Vinograd from London; Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels; Monika Pronczuk from Przemysl, Poland; and Jesus Jiménez from New York.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, addressed the Grammy Awards in a video, giving an emotional plea for support in his country’s war against Russia.
“What is more opposite to music?” Zelensky said. “The silence of ruined cities and killed people.”
The leader’s aides had lobbied for an appearance at the Academy Awards last week, but organizers did not commit to it, drawing some backlash.
In his brief address, Zelensky, an actor turned wartime leader, emphasized that many of the musicians in his country were fighting in the battle against the Russian invasion.
“Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos,” he said. “They sing to the wounded in hospitals. Even to those who can’t hear them.”
“Support us in any way you can,” he added. “Any, but not silence.”
After Zelensky’s address, John Legend performed his song “Free,” featuring a Ukrainian singer, Mika Newton, and a poet, Lyuba Yakimchuk, who fled the country days ago.
Here is Zelensky’s full speech:
The war. What is more opposite to music? The silence of ruined cities and killed people. Our children draw swooping rockets, not shooting stars. Over 400 children have been injured and 153 children died. And we’ll never see them drawing. Our parents are happy to wake up in the morning in bomb shelters. But alive. Our loved ones don’t know if we will be together again. The war doesn’t let us choose who survives and who stays in eternal silence. Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos. They sing to the wounded in hospitals, even to those who can’t hear them. But the music will break through anyway. We defend our freedom to live, to love, to sound on our land. We are fighting Russia, which brings horrible silence with its bombs. The dead silence. Fill the silence with your music. Fill it today to tell our story. Tell the truth about the war on your social networks, on TV. Support us in any way you can. Any — but not silence. And then peace will come. To all our cities the war is destroying — Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Volnovakha, Mariupol and others — they are legends already. But I have a dream of them living and free. Free like you on the Grammy stage.
Many in the music industry have made public statements opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and showing support for the Ukrainian people. On Sunday night at the Grammys, the Recording Academy teamed up with Global Citizen to highlight its “Stand Up for Ukraine” initiative.
The three major record conglomerates — Sony, Warner Music and Universal Music — have all suspended operations in Russia in response to the war, along with the touring behemoth Live Nation, which released a statement saying the company will “cease work with any and all Russian-based suppliers.” Spotify suspended its streaming service in Russia and closed its office in Moscow.
Musicians have also pledged solidarity with Ukraine, canceling shows and speaking out on social media. Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Björk, the Killers, AJR, Iggy Pop and others pulled out of shows in the region. Pink Floyd and David Gilmour yanked some of their music off digital providers in Russia and Belarus, writing in a statement on Twitter that the move was an effort “to stand with the world in strongly condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
And artists have hosted benefit concerts across the globe. Arcade Fire held a last-minute benefit show in New Orleans in March, donating all proceeds of the pay-what-you-can event to a relief fund for citizens in Ukraine. Days later, the band said it raised over $100,000 after donating the proceeds from additional shows in New York. Ed Sheeran, Camila Cabello, Nile Rodgers and others played a benefit concert in England last week. At a New York fund-raiser where she performed alongside Gogol Bordello, a band with Ukrainian roots, Patti Smith announced a $50,000 donation to Doctors Without Borders on behalf of Yoko Ono and Sean Ono Lennon.
Rachel Sherman contributed reporting.
At least 410 bodies of Ukrainian civilians have been recovered so far from towns around Kyiv from which Russian forces recently retreated, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said in a Facebook post on Sunday. The New York Times was not able to independently verify that figure.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said Sunday that he had approved the creation of a “special mechanism of justice” to investigate anyone who committed or participated in Russia’s war against Ukraine, in a steely video address that called on the world to “make the war crimes of the Russian military the last manifestation of such evil on earth.”
Mr. Zelensky’s remarks came as world leaders expressed horror at images that appeared to show civilians lying dead, some with their hands bound behind their backs, in the streets of Bucha, a town near Kyiv, after Russia withdrew troops from the area. Earlier Sunday, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the Ukrainian president described Russia’s actions as genocide.
“I want every mother of every Russian soldier to see the bodies of the killed people in Bucha, in Irpin, in Hostomel,” Mr. Zelensky said.
Mr. Zelensky also skewered what he called the West’s “indecision” and appeasement of Russia over the years, noting that Sunday is the 14th anniversary of a NATO summit in which Germany and France opposed extending membership to Ukraine.
He referenced Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy by name in his address, inviting the former leaders of the two countries to see the dead bodies of Ukrainian civilians “with their own eyes.”
Still, Mr. Zelensky specified that blame for civilian attacks lay only with Russian soldiers who perpetrated them and the Russian leaders who gave orders.
Russia’s Defense Ministry on Sunday called the reports of atrocities in Bucha “fake.”
The ministry also said that it had destroyed an aviation management center in the Kyiv region and large fuel depots near Mykolaiv.
Russian news coverage has largely focused on those strikes and other Russian advances, with little mention of forces retreating from the Kyiv region or of the bodies reportedly left in their wake.
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
April 3, 2022
Russia and Ukraine have called for dueling meetings of the United Nations Security Council this week on the situation in Ukraine. Russia requested a meeting for Monday on what it called “provocations of Ukrainian radicals” in Bucha. Ukraine requested a meeting for Tuesday to discuss Russia’s aggression and accused Russia of “twisting” and claiming the meeting as its own.
BUCHA, Ukraine — On Sunday, Ukrainians in the town of Bucha, Ukraine, were still finding dead bodies in yards and on the roads amid mounting evidence of executions and indiscriminate killings of civilians by Russian forces before they retreated.
Serhiy Kaplishny is a coroner in Bucha who worked there from Feb. 24, the day of the invasion, until March 10, and then returned on Saturday. He said his team had collected more than 100 bodies during and after the fighting and the Russian occupation.
Before he left the town in March, he said, he had arranged for a local backhoe operator to dig a mass grave in the yard of an Orthodox Church. Without electricity for refrigeration, the morgue had become inoperable, and another solution was needed. “It was a horror,” he said.
After he left, the mass grave filled up with about 40 bodies, he said, of people who died during the Russian occupation. Local coroners from his office who had stayed in the town had collected some of those bodies, he said.
On a visit on Sunday to the mass grave — about a dozen yards long and two yards wide — a pile of excavated dirt lay nearby to pile onto bodies. In one corner, two pairs of shoes and an arm protruded from a thin layer of dirt, and in another, a hand stuck out. On top of the pile, a half-dozen black body bags had been tipped into the pit.
Mr. Kaplishny said that before he left Bucha — as back-and-forth fighting raged and then the Russian army established control — he buried 57 bodies in a cemetery, 15 of whom had died of natural causes. The rest died from gunshot wounds, including point-blank shots in executions, or from shrapnel. Three of these bodies were Ukrainian soldiers, he said.
On Sunday, after he had returned to the town, he said he picked up about 30 bodies in a white van. Thirteen of them were men whose hands were tied and had been shot execution-style in the head. He said he did not know the circumstances of their deaths but believed, based on their apparently recent deaths, that they were prisoners killed before the Russian army withdrew.
“They were civilians,” Mr. Kaplishny said, showing cellphone pictures of bodies of men in civilian clothes with their hands bound behind their backs and in one case in the front.
In the images, eight bodies with hands bound lay in a courtyard of a house and five in a basement, he said. “Look, that one was shot in the eye,” Mr. Kaplishny said.
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April 3, 2022
An aid convoy that has been trying to reach Mariupol since Friday still has not made it to the besieged southern port city, the International Committee of the Red Cross said on Sunday.
Mariupol has sustained devastating attacks by Russian forces for weeks. Thousands of civilians remain trapped there with limited access to food, water and electricity.
Russia late Thursday had announced a cease-fire to start the following day to allow for evacuations out of Mariupol. Humanitarian efforts to reach the city for a large-scale evacuation have stalled repeatedly.
The Red Cross said that its team had set out for Mariupol from Zaporizhzhia, about 140 miles northwest, on Friday, but had to turn back “after arrangements and conditions made it impossible to proceed.”
The team, which includes nine workers and three vehicles, left Zaporizhzhia for a second time on Saturday morning and would be spending a second night on the route to Mariupol, the organization said in a statement.
The I.C.R.C. did not say where the team would overnight, but added that they would serve as a “neutral intermediary” for a humanitarian convoy out of the city once they arrive in Mariupol.
The Red Cross on Friday had said it hoped to carry thousands of people out of Mariupol through an evacuation convoy of about 54 buses, along with an unknown number of private vehicles.
The organization also said it had to leave behind two trucks filled with food, water and medicine after it did not receive permission from the Russians to deliver the aid.
While plans for a large-scale evacuation aided by the I.C.R.C. have failed, small groups have been able to leave the city on their own, according to local officials.
In a video address on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he hoped “there may still be a solution” for the situation in Mariupol.
“Europe has no right to react in silence to what is happening in our Mariupol,” Mr. Zelensky said in translated remarks of his address shared by his office. “The whole world must react to this humanitarian catastrophe.”
Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
TROSTYANETS, Ukraine — The last three Russian soldiers in this Ukrainian town are in the morgue, their uniforms bloodied and torn. The first one’s face is frozen in pain. The second has his wooden pipe in his lap. The third is stuffed in his sleeping bag.
These dead are not all that was left behind in Trostyanets, a strategically located town in the country’s northeast, where Russian forces fled several days ago in the face of an orchestrated Ukrainian assault. A monthlong Russian occupation reduced much of the town to rubble, a decimated landscape of mangled tank hulks, snapped trees and rattled but resilient survivors.
There are also stories, impossible to verify, highlighting the kind of hate left in an occupation’s wake and sharing a common thread of brutality: children held at knife point; an old woman forced to drink alcohol as her occupiers watched and laughed; whispers of rape and forced disappearances; and an old man found toothless, beaten in a ditch and defecated on.
“Oh, God, how I wanted to spit on them or hit them,” said Yevdokiya Koneva, 57, her voice steely as she pushed her aging bicycle toward the center of town on Friday.
Ukrainian forces are now gaining ground, as more than a month into the war Russian forces are pulling back from their positions north of Kyiv, even as Ukrainian soldiers are making progress here in the northeast. This area was supposed to be little more than a speed bump for a sprawling military campaign that would quickly take the country’s capital and leave the east in Russian hands.
Instead, a combination of logistics issues, low morale and poor planning among Russian forces allowed an emboldened Ukrainian military to go on the offensive along multiple axes, grinding down the occupying forces and splintering their front lines.