Zelensky Vilifies Russia Over Atrocities: ‘They Killed Complete Households’

Raging at Russia over rising proof of atrocities, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Tuesday delivered considered one of his most forceful denunciations of the invasion in a dwell video speech to the United Nations Safety Council, calling the Russians struggle criminals who he mentioned had killed households, raped ladies in entrance of their youngsters, pillaged houses and left his nation in ruins, “crammed with mass graves.”

In his speech — a day after touring Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, the capital, the place images have surfaced of many bodies of civilians Mr. Zelensky mentioned have been killed by retreating Russian troops — the Ukrainian president mentioned the Safety Council was ineffective if it couldn’t discover a method to maintain the perpetrators to account.

“There may be not a single crime that they might not commit there,” Mr. Zelensky mentioned of the departed Russian troops.

“Now the world can see what the Russian army did in Bucha, however the world has but to see what it has performed in different components of our nation,” Mr. Zelensky mentioned.

“The place is the safety that the Safety Council wants to ensure?” he requested. “It’s not there.”

The Kremlin has denied any accountability for the civilian atrocities in Bucha or elsewhere in Ukraine and has mentioned the pictures and visible proof of execution-style killings within the northern suburbs are fabrications.

An analysis of satellite images by The New York Times rebuts claims by Russia that the killing of civilians in Bucha occurred after its troopers had left the city.

“They purposely killed anybody,” Mr. Zelensky mentioned. “They killed whole households, adults and kids, and so they tried to burn the our bodies.”

Some victims in Bucha have been “shot and killed behind their heads,” he mentioned, whereas “some have been shot on the road, others thrown into wells.”

It was Mr. Zelensky’s first speech to the Safety Council for the reason that invasion greater than a month in the past, and he confirmed no signal of wishing to barter with Russia. Slightly, he described the United Nations as a powerless and outdated group that wanted to purge Russia of the veto energy it wields on the council.

Afterward, the 15-member council seen a brief video provided by the Ukraine authorities that confirmed pictures of what gave the impression to be charred, rotting and slaughtered our bodies from a number of Ukrainian cities.

Barbara Woodward, the British ambassador who’s the council’s president for April, described the pictures as harrowing. “Talking in my nationwide capability, we’re appalled by what we’ve got seen and reiterate our solidarity with Ukraine,” she mentioned, a sentiment echoed by a number of different ambassadors.

Russia’s ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, categorically rejected all of Mr. Zelensky’s accusations and mentioned Russian forces couldn’t have presumably dedicated such acts.

He advised the Ukrainian chief had been deceived by the US and its European allies. He additionally advised that neo-Nazis managed the Ukrainian authorities, invoking a false narrative that Russia has used to justify the invasion of the previous Soviet republic.

Nazis, Mr. Nebenzya mentioned, “are operating the present” in Ukraine. “How can it’s every other manner when the individuals operating Ukraine are Nazi collaborators?”

Addressing Mr. Zelensky, the Russian ambassador mentioned: “You merely favor to not discover Ukrainian Nazis, pretending they’re not there. sadly they’re there.”

Mr. Zelensky, who’s Jewish, misplaced many relations within the Holocaust.