United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called in a tweet on Sunday for an independent investigation that will lead to effective accountability after stressing how deeply shocked he was by images of civilian deaths in Ukraine.
Images of corpses on the streets of Bucha, a city outside of Kyiv, circulated over the weekend – shared by journalists and officials – after the city suffered weekslong firefights between Russian and Ukrainian forces.
Graphic footage from Bucha is showing multiple bodies clad in civilian clothing scattered around.
Kyiv was quick to blame the Russian military for the incident the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called a “deliberate massacre” in a tweet, accusing Russians of trying to eliminate as many Ukrainians as they can, and demanding immediately new, devastating G7 sanctions.
Also on Sunday, Human Rights Watch detailed in its report instances of war crimes during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Bucha Mayor Anatoly Fedorur said that 280 people have been buried in mass graves after the fights with Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak stressing that it was the Russian forces that executed the people in the images.
Top Western politicians have immediately backed and amplified Kyiv’s claims.
Branding the incident brutality against civilians unseen in Europe for decades while commenting on the horrific images, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stressed while speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union”, that civilians’ targeting and killing is absolutely unacceptable and it just underlines how important is that this war ends.
Stoltenberg also pointed out that it’s Russian President Vladimir Putin’s responsibility to stop the war.
The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the incident a punch in the gut, noting that the United States is among the countries collecting evidence of Russian atrocities for future prosecution in international courts.
Many other Western officials have taken a similar stance with some of them, such as French President Emmanuel Macron, explicitly pinning the blame for the massacre on Moscow and stressing that Russian authorities will have to answer for these crimes after an investigation.
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