“Mr President Macron, how many times have you negotiated with Putin, what have you achieved?” Mr Morawiecki asked the French leader at a news conference on Monday. “Have you stopped any of the actions that have been taken?” He went on to compare Putin to despots under whose regimes there had been repression and mass assassinations. “There is no negotiation with criminals, criminals must be fought. No one negotiated with Hitler. “Would you negotiate with Hitler, with Stalin, with Pol Pot afterwards?” said Mr Morawiecki. The French leader’s scolding comes as Poland is frustrated by Europe’s inaction in imposing tougher sanctions on Moscow and an embargo on energy exports. Macron has spoken to Putin at least 16 times since December, as reports of war crimes committed in several Ukrainian cities are rising. A grim example of evidence of war crimes comes from Bucha, a city near the capital Kyiv, where Ukrainian officials said they found nearly 410 bodies, many of them with signs of torture scattered on the streets. The Independent reported that corpses and charred skeletons were left on the streets, while civilian bodies were also left inside their homes. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has survived multiple assassination attempts, visited Bucha on his first trip out of the capital shortly after reports of the killings surfaced. “We know of thousands of people who have been killed and tortured, with severed limbs, raped women and murdered children; the dead have been found in barrels, underground, strangled, tortured,” he said. The horrific scenes of abused or burnt corpses left in the countryside or hastily buried have caught the attention of international attention and shocked world leaders calling for tougher sanctions against the Kremlin, which has denied the allegations. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday that the situation in the Ukrainian city was a “fake attack” aimed at undermining Moscow. Responding to the Polish leader’s statements, Mr Macron’s office said that communication with Russia was necessary for Putin to understand the demands of Western countries and the cost to Russia of ignoring them. “From the beginning, the president has used all available means to get Putin to stop the war: huge sanctions, support for Ukraine, demands made directly on President Putin during their talks,” said a French presidency official. . In the past, Elysian officials have issued scathing statements about the negotiating calls, saying Mr Putin had appeared “paranoid” in those calls and that he had lied to the French president. The Independent has a proud campaign history for the rights of the most vulnerable and we first launched our “Welcome Refugees” campaign during the war in Syria in 2015. Now, as we renew our campaign and start this report on In the wake of the unfolding Ukrainian crisis, we call on the government to move faster and faster to secure aid. To learn more about our Refugee Campaign, click here. To sign the application click here. If you would like to donate, click here for our GoFundMe page.
