Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has continued to demand war crimes trials for Russian troops and their leaders, warning that they are preparing for new attacks in eastern and southern Ukraine. The Ukrainian military says Russia is preparing for an attack in eastern Ukraine with the aim of “restoring full control of the territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.” During the night, Russian forces attacked a fuel depot and a factory in the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine, said the governor of the region Valentyn Reznichenko in the Telegram messaging application early Wednesday. The number of victims was unclear. “The night was worrying and difficult. The enemy attacked our area from the air and hit the oil depot and one of the factories. The oil depot with fuel was destroyed. “Rescuers are still extinguishing the flames in the factory,” Reznichenko wrote. Police in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, said a car had knocked on the door of the Russian embassy early Wednesday, engulfed in flames and killed the driver. There is no immediate information on possible motivation or other details. In Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, the bombing of the city of Rubizhne on Tuesday killed one person and injured five others, Governor Serhiy Haidai told the Telegram. Parts of Donetsk and Luhansk have been under Russian-backed rebel control since 2014 and are recognized by Moscow as independent states. So far, Ukrainian forces have been holding back Russian troops trying to push east, but they remain fewer in number of both troops and equipment, Zelensky said in a video speech in his country late Tuesday. Evidence of intentional killings of civilians in Bukha and other cities before the withdrawal of Russian forces from the outskirts of Kiev has sparked a worldwide outcry. Western countries have deported many Moscow diplomats and are expected to impose more sanctions on Wednesday. They will include a ban on any new investment in Russia, a senior US government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the impending announcement. The EU executive, meanwhile, has proposed banning coal imports from Russia worth 4 billion euros ($ 4.4 billion) a year. It would be the first time the 27-nation bloc has imposed sanctions on the country’s lucrative energy industry over the war. Speaking at the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Zelensky said citizens in cities around Kyiv were tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown into wells, grenades were blown up in their apartments and they were beaten to death by a car. . The perpetrators of the killings and those who gave the orders “should be brought to justice immediately for war crimes” before a tribunal similar to the one set up in Nuremberg after World War II, he said. “But we have no choice – the fate of our land and our people is being decided,” he said. “We know what we are fighting for. “And we will do everything to win.” Russia has insisted that its troops have not committed war crimes. Moscow’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, said “no locals” had suffered violence while Buha was under Russian control. Echoing the Kremlin’s comments, he said the street scenes were “a blatant forgery” organized by Ukrainians. In the still largely empty streets of Bouha, dogs wandered among ruined buildings and burned military vehicles. Officials took photos of the bodies before collecting some of them. Survivors of a monthly Russian occupation showed investigators the bodies of residents of the city who were allegedly shot by Russian troops. Those who hid in their homes during the occupation, many of them beyond middle age, passed through charred tanks and jagged glass with plastic bags of food and other humanitarian aid. Red Cross workers checked in intact houses. Associated Press reporters in Bucha have counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes and interviewed Ukrainians who spoke of witnessing atrocities. Also, high-resolution satellite images from Maxar Technologies showed many of the corpses lying in the countryside for weeks while Russian forces were in the city. The dead in Bucha included a pile of six charred corpses, according to AP reporters. It was not clear who they were or how they died. One of the bodies was most likely a child, said Andriy Nebitov, chief of police in the Kiev region. Many of the dead seen by AP reporters appeared to have been shot at close range, and some had their hands tied or their flesh burned. The AP and PBS ‘Frontline series have jointly confirmed at least 90 wartime incidents that appear to be in violation of international law. The War Crimes Watch Ukraine project looks at obvious targeted and indiscriminate attacks. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the images from Bucha revealed “not the accidental act of a rogue unit” but “a deliberate campaign to kill, torture, rape and commit atrocities.” He said reports of atrocities were “more than credible”. The attorney general of the International Criminal Court in The Hague launched an investigation a month ago into possible war crimes in Ukraine. Elsewhere in Ukraine, in Borodyanka, northwest of Kiev, a 25-year-old man, Dmitriy Yevtushkov, searched the rubble of an apartment building and found that only one photo album was left of his family home. In the besieged southern city of Mykolaiv, a passerby stopped for a moment to see the bright blossoms of a crumbling flower base among bloodstains, the legacy of a Russian shell that killed nine people in the city center. The spectator sketched the sign of the cross in the air and moved on. British defense officials said on Wednesday that 160,000 people remained trapped by Russian airstrikes and heavy fighting in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol. The Ministry of Defense information update stated that the city “has no light, communication, medicines, heat or water”. He accused the Russian forces of deliberately blocking access to humanitarian aid, “possibly forcing the defenders to surrender”. Attempts by the International Committee of the Red Cross to transport humanitarian convoys to Mariupol failed. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Russian forces had stopped buses accompanied by Red Cross workers traveling to Mariupol, which had a population of more than 400,000 before the war. He said Russian troops had allowed 1,496 civilians to leave the Sea of Azov port on Tuesday. While representatives of both Ukraine and Russia sent optimistic messages after the last round of talks a week ago, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow would not accept Ukraine’s demand that a future peace agreement be reached immediately. followed by a Ukrainian referendum on the agreement.
Oleksandr Stashevskyi and Cara Anna in Bucha, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and Associated Press reporters around the world contributed to this report.
Follow the AP coverage for the war at
