As Ukrainian armored columns rolled into Bucha, a city northwest of the capital, they found roads blocked by burned Russian tanks and military vehicles and strewn with the bodies of civilians who locals said had been killed by incursion forces. . Photographs from the city showed a scene of destruction, with pieces of charred and damaged tanks and armored vehicles lined up along a road, along with corpses. A soldier films a damaged Russian tank and armored vehicle in Bucha. Photo: Zohra Bensemra / Reuters Reporters from the French Agency saw at least 20 bodies, all in civilian clothes, strewn on a single street in Bucha, and the body of a missing Ukrainian photographer, Maksim Levin, was found in a nearby village. Three of them were entangled in bicycles after their last ride, while others had fallen next to cars that had been hit by bullets and shattered, the French Agency reported. One had his hands tied behind his back in a white cloth and his Ukrainian passport was left open next to his body, reporters who visited the devastated city said. “All these people were shot,” Buha mayor Anatoly Fedoruk told AFP, adding that another 280 bodies had been buried in mass graves in the city. “These are the consequences of the Russian occupation.” Ukrainian soldiers in Bukha, who were warmly welcomed by the townspeople, attached wires to the corpses and pulled them off the road, fearing they might be trapped by explosions. Soldiers also cleared roadblocks and inspected suspicious objects, placing red rags on unexploded ordnance to draw attention to the possibility of explosions. As the town was liberated, a woman, Halyna Tovkach, 55, told the Guardian that she was searching for the body of her husband, Oleg, 62. He was killed by Russian soldiers along with their neighbors, two young boys and their mother. as they tried to escape the city on March 5. “It’s a war crime,” said Tovkach’s son. Among the civilians killed by the Russians were reportedly Olha Sukhenko, the head of the village of Motyzhin east of Kiev, and her entire family. Damaged cars are seen on a highway 20 km from Kyiv near the city of Bucha. Photo: Mykhaylo Palinchak / SOPA Images / REX / Shutterstock In another war crimes charge, Russian troops allegedly used children as “human shields” while rebuilding their forces. Ukraine’s attorney general is compiling a dossier alleging the use of local children by Russia to avoid fire as they leave the Ukrainian capital and elsewhere. Coaches with children are said to have been stationed in front of tanks in the village of Novyi Bykiv, near the besieged city of Chernihiv, 100 miles north of Kiev. British Foreign Secretary Liz Truce has said she is “terrified of the atrocities in Bhutan and other Ukrainian cities.” “Reports of Russian forces targeting innocent civilians are appalling. The UK is working with others to gather evidence and support the @IntlCrimCourt war crimes investigation. “Those responsible will be held accountable,” Tras wrote on Twitter late Saturday. Terrified by the atrocities in Bukha and other cities in Ukraine. Reports of Russian forces targeting innocent civilians are appalling. The UK is working with others to gather evidence and support the @IntlCrimCourt war crimes investigation. Those responsible will be held accountable. – Liz Truss (@trussliz) April 2, 2022 Ukraine and its Western allies have reported growing indications that Russia is withdrawing its forces from Kyiv and building the strength of its troops in eastern Ukraine. The visible shift did not mean that the country was facing a postponement after more than five weeks of war or that more than 4 million refugees who had fled Ukraine would return soon. The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, reiterated his warning that Russian troops want to occupy Donbass and the southern part of Ukraine. “We know the enemy has reserves to increase pressure on the east,” Zelensky said in a video overnight speech Saturday. A Ukrainian soldier searches for the wreckage of a damaged Russian tank in a village near Irpin on the outskirts of Kiev. Photo: Daniel Ceng Shou-Yi / ZUMA Press Wire / REX / Shutterstock However, he promised to give the battle to the Russians in Donbas and as they retreated from the Kiev region. “We are strengthening our defenses in the east and in Donbas,” Zelenski said. “What is the goal of the Russian troops?” “They want to occupy both Donbass and the south of Ukraine.” But Zelensky complained that “the global security architecture has failed” and that Ukraine “has not yet received enough modern Western missile systems” from its Western allies, nor has it provided aircraft. He added: “Every Russian missile that hits our cities and every bomb that falls on our people, our children, adds only black paint to history that will describe everyone on whom the decision depended.” Several sources reported a series of explosions in the southern port city of Odessa on Sunday morning. “Odessa was attacked from the air. “Some of the missiles were shot down by the air defense,” the city council said in a brief statement on the Telegram messaging app. He said there were fires in some areas, but gave no indication of what hit the attack. Ukraine’s peace negotiator, David Arahamia, has reportedly said that Russia “orally” accepts Ukraine’s position on the peace talks, the French news agency reported, citing the Crimean issue. Moscow had also agreed that a referendum on Ukraine’s neutral status “would be the only way out of this situation.” Arahamia also told Ukrainian television that any meeting between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin would “most likely” take place in Turkey. Elsewhere, the Polish deputy prime minister accused France and Germany of being too close to Russia in an interview published Sunday, as he condemned Berlin’s behavior towards Moscow before the invasion of Ukraine. “Germany, like France, has a strong bias in favor of Moscow,” said Jaroslav Kaczynski, who is also the leader of the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), in an interview with the German newspaper Die Welt. Kaczynski kept his strongest words about Berlin, saying that for years the German government did not want to see what Russia did under Putin “and we see the result today.” He added that “Poland is not satisfied with Germany’s role in Europe.”
