In his daily midnight address, President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed to hold Russia accountable for the human atrocities left behind over the weekend by the invading Kremlin forces in the northwestern suburbs of Kyiv.
“Today has been a really difficult day,” he said in the video with English subtitles after on April 4 visiting the towns of Stoyanka, Irpin and Bucha, where hundreds of executed civilians were found strewn on the streets with signs of torture, and some blindfolded and having their hands tied behind their backs.
Although many bodies had been removed, “many of the dead still remain” in the liberated settlements, he said. More civilians are feared killed by Russian troops in the Kyiv regional town of Borodyanka, located further northwest of Bucha and Kyiv.
Zelensky said there is evidence of similar mass killings of civilians in the liberated regions of Sumy and Chernihiv that neighbor Kyiv as well.
“It was difficult to look at the bullet holes on vehicles that had the inscription of ‘children’ on them,” Ukraine’s second war-time president said.
More than 300 civilians were killed in Bucha and tortured alone, he said.
(Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky midnight address address to the nation on April 5.)
“Most likely the kill count [of civilians] will be higher once everything is investigated,” Zelensky added. “The occupiers will bear responsibility for this.”
Investigators are “doing everything possible” to identify all “the Russian military personnel involved in these crimes as soon as possible.”
Zelensky said Ukraine is working jointly with the European Union and international institutions, in particular the International Criminal Court, to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of the alleged war crimes.
“We are interested in the most complete, transparent investigation, the results of which will be known and explained to the entire international community,” he said.
Western governments and political blocs, including, Britain, the United States and the EU in Brussels have stated that the atrocities seen so far amount to war crimes and appear to be systemic in nature.
Russia has denied the killings of civilians in Bucha and elsewhere saying they were staged by the Ukrainian authorities.
Kremlin despot Vladimir Putin ordered a multi-pronged invasion of Ukraine on February 24 as part of a larger he has waged against the neighboring country since 2014 Russia forcibly seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and occupied parts of the easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Thousands have died in the war and about a quarter of Ukraine’s population of 40 million-44 million has been displaced in what is the largest humanitarian catastrophe on the European continent since World War II.
