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Vladimir Putin’s war crimes have been exposed in a damning international report a day after US President Joe Biden accused the Russian strongman of trying to ‘wipe out’ Ukrainians in a ‘genocide’.
An Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) report has accused Russia of ‘clear patterns of international humanitarian law violations’ in Ukraine and said if Moscow had respected its international obligations after invading Ukraine on February 24, ‘the number of civilians killed or injured would have remained much lower’.
It comes after the body of ‘beautiful’ Ukrainian teenager Karina Yershova was identified after she was allegedly raped, shot in the back of the head and dumped by Russian troops in a backyard in Bucha, where more than 400 bodies were found after Moscow’s men withdrew earlier this month.
A friend of Yershova’s mother, Olesya Vasylets wrote on Facebook: ‘Friends, terrible news. Racists killed my friend’s daughter Karina Yershova. The pain is terrible. She was mocked, raped, and then shot in the trash. Today my mother found out that she was killed and created a help group. Please help me bury her, I knew this kid for years, taught her English, she was a very bright and talented girl.’
Yershova disappeared early last month and on March 10 her mother on social media appealed for information to ‘help me find my daughter’ who was last seen on ‘energy workers street’ in Bucha. ‘I really hope for help, thank you,’ she said. It is not clear if Yershova was targeted on purpose by Russian forces.
The chief prosecutor from the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, visited Bucha today, describing the Kyiv suburb as a ‘crime scene’ and confirming investigators ‘have reasonable grounds to believe the crimes within the jurisdiction of the court are being committed. We have to pierce the fog of war to get to the truth.’
Biden yesterday warned Putin was trying to ‘wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian’ as he emphasised his use of the word ‘genocide’ to reporters in Iowa while boarding Air Force One to return to Washington, but said he would ‘let the lawyers decide’.
French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking on France 2 television as he ramps up his re-election campaign against far-right leader Marine Le Pen, declined today to repeat Biden’s genocide accusation as he warned that verbal escalations would not help end the war.
It comes as Ukrainian soldiers in Mariupol were putting up a hellish last stand in tunnels under an abandoned Stalingrad-esque steel plant in the besieged southern city in a bid to make conquering the Sea of Azov port as hard as possible for the attackers even as experts warned its fall was ‘inevitable’.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who says his forces are playing a major role in Russia’s battle for Mariupol, said today that more than 1,000 Ukrainian marines had surrendered and urged remaining forces holed up in the Azovstal steel mill to surrender. Ukrainian authorities immediately denied the reports.
Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said humanitarian corridors used to get people out of cities under Russian attack will not operate today because of poor security though there are more than 100,000 people awaiting evacuation from Mariupol.
Karina Yershova, 16, was found shot in the back of the head after she was allegedly raped and murdered by Russian troops
A friend of Yershova’s mother, Olesya Vasylets wrote on Facebook: ‘Friends, terrible news. Racists killed my friend’s daughter Karina Yershova (pictured) 16-year-old Karina Yershova…. the pain is terrible’
The teenager’s death is the latest discovery in the Bucha massacre which left more than 400 civilians dead, although the exact number killed is still unknown (pictured, officials excavate mass graves in Bucha)
Bodies are exhumed and removed from a mass-grave in the grounds of the St. Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints church in Bucha
The discovery of more mass graves in Bucha (pictured) comes as Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) published audio that purports to show a Russian woman giving her soldier partner permission to rape locals in Ukraine
The forensic team exhume the bodies of a mother and two children buried near the mass grave by a church in the town of horrors
French forensics investigators, who arrived to Ukraine for the investigation of war crimes, stand next to a mass grave
Ukrainian and French forensics investigators place remains of burned civilians exhumed from a grave in body bags, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in the town of Bucha
Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko also tweeted the news today, writing: ’16 y.o. Karina raped by #Russia soldiers and shot in the head. Her mother’s search for her ended as her tortured body was found in #Bucha.’
President Vlodymyr Zelensky early on Wednesday said evidence of ‘inhuman cruelty’ toward women and children in Bucha and other suburbs of Kyiv continued to surface, including alleged rapes.
According to International law, rape and murder of civilians is a war crime.
The 110-page OSCE report presented at the permanent council meeting pointed at damaged and destroyed houses, hospitals, schools, water stations and other infrastructure.
The three experts who wrote the report, which included information from NGOs on the ground, said given the timeline and scope of their mission it was not possible to identify war crimes.
‘Nevertheless, the mission found clear patterns of international humanitarian law violations by the Russian forces in their conduct of hostilities,’ the report said.
The OSCE mission was set up following a request by Ukraine on March 3.
It covers the period from the invasion on February 24 to April 1, before images of bodies emerged as Russia withdrew from the town of Bucha and elsewhere in northern Ukraine.
The images shocked the world and prompted accusations of Russian war crimes.
But the report noted that ‘evidence points to a major war crime and a crime against humanity committed by the Russian forces’, calling for an international probe.
The report’s authors said it was ‘likely’ other ‘violent acts’ documented, such as targeted killing, enforced disappearance or abductions of civilians, qualified as a crime against humanity.
The report also found the conflict ‘has exerted and continues to exert particularly negative effects’ on women, children, older people and people with disabilities – and expressed ‘concern’ over Ukraine’s treatment of prisoners.
‘As this report shows, violations occurred on the Ukrainian as well as on the Russian side. The violations committed by the Russian Federation, however, are by far larger in scale and nature,’ it said.
The report was carried out under the OSCE’s so-called Moscow Mechanism, which allows for an ad hoc team of experts to be established to assist in resolving an OSCE member state’s problems. Russia declined to contribute to the report, according to the experts, deeming the mechanism ‘largely outdated and redundant’.
Volunteers load bodies of civilians killed in Bucha onto a truck to be taken to a morgue for investigation into possible war crimes
The prosecutor general of Ukraine, Iryna Venediktova, visits the exhumation of a mass grave with French forensic investigators
The Russian retreat from towns near Kyiv has revealed scores of civilian deaths and the full extent of devastation from Russia’s attempt to seize the Ukrainian capital
The White House is debating how much to involve itself in the investigation into Russian atrocities by the International Criminal Court in The Hague
A man pushes his bike through debris and destroyed Russian military vehicles on a street in Bucha
Civilians inspect the wreckage of a tank in the town of Bucha, the scene of horrific Russian atrocities
Vladyslava Liubarets, a Bucha resident, walks with her family past destroyed Russian military machinery
A satellite image taken of a street in the city of Bucha on March 19 – when Russian forces were in full control of the city – shows dark objects in the road that exactly match where civilian corpses were later discovered by Ukrainian troops
Pictured: Locals carry a coffin on a wheelbarrow as the city was hit by shelling in the small city of Borodyanka near Kiev
Cemetery workers unload bodies of civilians killed in and around Bucha before they are transported to the morgue at a cemetery
War crime prosecutor’s team member speaks on the phone next to buildings that were destroyed by Russian shelling, amid Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, in Borodyanka
The chief prosecutor from the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, (pictured in August 2021) visited Bucha today, describing the Kyiv suburb as a ‘crime scene’
Biden’s designation of Russian actions in Ukraine as a ‘genocide’ drew praise from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had encouraged Western leaders to use the term.
‘True words of a true leader @POTUS,’ he tweeted. ‘Calling things by their names is essential to stand up to evil. We are grateful for US assistance provided so far and we urgently need more heavy weapons to prevent further Russian atrocities.’
A United Nations treaty, to which the US is a party, defines genocide as actions taken with the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’
Past American leaders often have dodged formally declaring bloody campaigns such as Russia’s in Ukraine as genocide, hesitating to trigger an obligation that under international convention requires signing countries to intervene once genocide is formally identified.
But French President Macron warned this morning leaders should be careful with language.
‘I would say that Russia unilaterally unleashed the most brutal war, that it is now established that war crimes were committed by the Russian army and that it is now necessary to find those responsible and make them face justice,’ Macron said.
‘It’s madness what’s happening, it’s incredibly brutal,’ he added. ‘But at the same time I look at the facts and I want to try as much as possible to continue to be able to stop this war and to rebuild peace. I’m not sure that verbal escalations serve this cause,’ he said.
The comments by Macron, who has kept dialogue going with Putin during the conflict, echo concerns the French leader expressed last month after Biden called Putin a ‘butcher’.
An investigation into war crimes is already underway in Ukraine, including into atrocities revealed after Moscow’s retreat from cities and towns around Kyiv.
More than 720 people were killed in Kyiv suburbs that had been occupied by Russian troops and over 200 were considered missing, the Interior Ministry said early Wednesday.
In the Chernihiv region, villagers said more than 300 people had been trapped for almost a month by the occupying Russian troops in the basement of a school and only allowed outside to go to the toilet or cook on open fires.
Ukraine’s prosecutor-general’s office said Tuesday it was also looking into events in the Brovary district, which lies to the northeast of the capital.
It said the bodies of six civilians were found with gunshot wounds in a basement in the village of Shevchenkove and Russian forces were believed to be responsible.
Prosecutors are also investigating allegations that Russian forces fired on a convoy of civilians trying to leave by car from the village of Peremoha in the Brovary district, killing four people including a 13-year-old boy.
In another attack near Bucha, five people were killed including two children when a car was fired upon, prosecutors said.
Forensic investigators began exhuming a mass grave in Bucha containing more than 410 bodies of civilians, according to Ukrainian officials. The UN Human Rights Council has decided to launch an investigation into the violations committed after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Parliament reported
Members of an international team of war crimes prosecutors and Prosecutor General of Ukraine Iryna Venediktova (C) during a visit to a mass grave in Bucha, Kyiv (Kiev) area, Ukraine, 12 April 2022
Satellite images taken over Mariupol yesterday show buildings on fire across the city as Russian forces continue to bombard the Black Sea stronghold. Separate images from Crimea show Russian forces massing combat equipment and transporters in Dzhankoi.
Moscow said yesterday it was mustering a new force to outnumber Ukrainian soldiers in the country’s east by five to one ahead of a ‘decisive battle’ for the Donbas region intended to crush the resistance by ‘Russian victory day’ on May 9.
Putin has for weeks been redeploying troops to three areas on Ukraine’s border, in the Belgorod and Voronezh regions and around Matveev Kurgan, after withdrawing more than 24,000 soldiers from the capital Kyiv.
But Ukrainian military officials have questioned where the extra soldiers are coming from, and suggested the new force will still fall short of the might Russia needs to overrun Kyiv’s troops.
The Kremlin has maintained the war is going ‘to plan’ after Putin on Monday said Russia would achieve all of its ‘noble’ aims and ‘rhythmically and calmly’ continue what it calls a special operation.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last night mocked Putin’s claims, asking how a plan that saw tens of thousands of troops being killed in a month could have been approved.
Speaking from Kyiv in a video posted to social media, Zelensky also repeated calls for the West to step in now and prevent the use of chemical weapons on Ukrainian soil, saying any deployment of them would be ‘a humiliation for the democratic world’.
Meanwhile Zelensky today claimed that Russia has used phosphorous bombs in Ukraine and accused Moscow of deploying terror tactics against civilians, though he did not provide evidence.
Adressing the Estonian parliament, Zelensky said: ‘The Russian army is using all types of artillery, all types of missile, air bombs in particular phosphorous bombs against residential districts and civilian infrastructure. This is clear terror against the civilian population.’
Ukrainian soldiers have taken to tunnels under the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol in a hellish last stand against Russian forces advancing on the city.
The urban landscape of the steelworks seems almost tailor-made for guerrilla warfare, with sprawling rail lines, warehouses, coal furnaces, factories, chimneys and tunnels.
The maze-like area is a metal works complex, Azovstal, owned by Metinvest, which has been the focus of urban fighting in Mariupol, just like the nearby Azovmash factory which makes rail components, cranes and other large metal structures.
Satellite images from the Crimean peninsula show Russian forces massing combat equipment and transporters in Dzhankoi
Much of the city of Mariupol has been leveled in weeks of pummelling at then hands of Moscow’s forces
Ukrainian fighters are putting up a hellish last stand in tunnels under an abandoned Stalingrad-esque Azovstal steel plant (pictured) in Mariupol as Russian forces close in on the besieged port city
This satellite image released on April 12, 2022, by Maxar Technologies shows buildings on fire in western Mariupol, Ukraine, on April 9, 2022
Mariupol’s partially destroyed drama theatre which was hit on March 16 by a Russian airstrike as part of an intense campaign by Moscow’s forces who are trying to take the city
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