Killing of civilians in Bucha sparks international outrage

Western powers yesterday vowed to hold Russia accountable for the killing of civilians in the town of Bucha and other areas around Kyiv, accusing Moscow of a “terrible” war crime.

- KIM SENGUPTA and KIERAN GUILBERT

Officials in Ukraine said that troops had found civilian corpses with bound hands, gunshot wounds to the head, and showing signs of torture after Russian soldiers withdrew from the outskirts of the country’s capital. The Ukrainian government has accused Russia’s armed forces of carrying out a “massacre” and “genocide”.

After Ukraine announced on Saturday that it had reclaimed control of the Kyiv region – the first time it has done so since Vladimir Putin launched his invasion on 24 February – the mayor of Bucha, a liberated town 37 km (23 miles) northwest of the capital, said that hundreds of its residents had been killed by the Russian army. Ukrainian prosecutors investigating possible war crimes by Russia have so far found 410 bodies in various towns near Kyiv, the country’s prosecutor general Iryna Venedyktova said yesterday.

The photographs of bodies strewn across the street, wrapped in bin bags and buried in mass graves, in Bucha as well as in the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin and Hostomel, spurred calls from officials in Ukraine, and vows from ministers across Europe, to impose tougher sanctions on Moscow.