Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, April 10: Even as the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson paid a surprise visit to war-torn Ukraine on Saturday and met the president Volodymyr Zelensky in the capital city of Kyiv, Ukraine claims to have found a grave with dozens of Ukrainians civilians Buzova village near Kyiv, the latest reported mass grave to be discovered as Russian forces retreat from their offensive on the capital and focus their assault on the east.
Taras Didych, head of the Dmytrivka community that includes Buzova, told Ukrainian television that the bodies were found in a ditch near a petrol station. The number of dead had yet to be confirmed. “Now we are returning to life but during the occupation we had our ‘hotspots’, many civilians died,” Didych said.
As Johnson met Zelensky and pledged armoured vehicles and anti-ship missile systems, along with additional support for World Bank loans and the pair took a heavily guarded stroll through central Kyiv, Ukrainian officials said the airport in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro had been completely destroyed in fresh Russian shelling. “There has been another attack on Dnipro airport. There is nothing left of it. The airport itself and the infrastructure around it has been destroyed. Rockets keep flying and flying,” the head of the city’s military administration, Valentin Reznichenko, said on Telegram. He added that authorities were seeking to clarify information about victims.
Reznichenko said attacks on the city, which lies on the banks of Dnieper River, intensified on Sunday. The industrial city of one million people has been targeted by Russian forces since the Russian invasion but has so far been spared major destruction. The announcement came as Ukraine, which rebuffed a Russian offensive on Kyiv, anticipates a renewed Kremlin attack on the east and south of the country.
Mounting civilian casualties have triggered a new wave of international condemnation, in particular over hundreds of deaths in the town of Bucha, to the northwest of Kyiv that until last week was occupied by Russian forces. Ukraine and the West have accused Russian forces of war crimes in Bucha while Russia has denied targeting civilians in what it calls a “special operation” to demilitarize and “denazify” its southern neighbour. Ukraine and Western nations have dismissed this as a baseless pretext for war.
Russia has failed to take one major city since the start of the invasion on February 24, but Ukraine says Russia is gathering its forces in the east for a major assault and has urged people to flee. Britain’s defence ministry said Russia was seeking to establish a land corridor from Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and the eastern Donbas region, which is partly held by Moscow-backed separatists.
Some cities there are under heavy shelling with tens of thousands of people unable to evacuate. “This will be a hard battle, we believe in this fight and our victory. We are ready to simultaneously fight and look for diplomatic ways to put an end to this war,” Zelensky said in an address late on Saturday. Zelensky said Russia’s use of force was “a catastrophe that will inevitably hit everyone”. “Russian aggression was not intended to be limited to Ukraine alone … the whole European project is a target for Russia,” he said.”
“Russia can still afford to live in illusions and bring new military forces and new equipment to our land. And that means we need even more sanctions and even more weapons for our state, Zelensky said and called on the West to impose a complete embargo on Russian energy products and to supply Ukraine with more weapons.
Britain will also ratchet up its sanctions on Russia and move away from using Russian hydrocarbons. Johnson, speaking to reporters with Zelensky, said support for Ukraine was intended to ensure it “can never be bullied again, never will be blackmailed again, never will be threatened in the same way again.” Johnson was the latest foreign leader to visit Kyiv after Russian forces pulled back from the area. The visits are a sign that Kyiv is returning to some degree of normality. Some residents are coming back and cafes and restaurants are reopening. Italy said it planned to re-open its embassy this month.
But in the east, calls by Ukrainian officials for civilians to flee have been given a greater sense of urgency by a missile attack on Friday on a train station in the city of Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region, crowded with women, children and the elderly trying to get out. Kramatorsk Mayor Oleksander Honcharenko said he expected just 50,000 to 60,000 of the city’s population of 220,000 to remain as people flee. Residents of the besieged region of Luhansk would have nine trains on Sunday to get out on, the region’s governor, Serhiy Gaidai, wrote on the Telegram message service.
British military intelligence said Russia’s retreat from the capital region revealed “disproportionate” targeting of civilians. Russia’s invasion has forced about a quarter of Ukraine’s 44 million people from their homes, turned cities into rubble and killed or injured thousands. The European Union on Friday adopted new sanctions against Russia, including bans on the import of coal, wood, chemicals and other products. Oil and gas imports from Russia remain untouched. Ukraine has banned all imports from Russia, a key trading partners before the war with annual imports valued at about $6 billion.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova said on Sunday that Ukraine was examining the alleged culpability of 500 Russian leaders for thousands of war crimes, including President Vladimir Putin. She also thanked Johnson for his surprise visit to Kyiv and promising more UK military aid. “I think that the Ukrainians have shown the courage of a lion, and you, Volodymyr, have given the roar of that lion,” Johnson said in televised remarks, standing alongside the president.
Venediktova said Johnson’s trip had offered “really great support for us”, as she detailed alleged atrocities by Russian invaders, including at a railway station packed with fleeing civilians. “Of course what we see on the ground in all the regions of Ukraine, it is war crimes, crimes against humanity,” the prosecutor added, speaking in English.
She said there was “full evidence” linking Russian forces to the missile attack on the station at Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, where officials said 52 people were killed. “That’s why it will be one of the cases in our big profile,” Venediktova said. “You know that now we started 5,600 cases in Ukraine on the above war crimes”, involving “500 suspects” from Russia’s government and military, she said.
“Vladimir Putin is the main war criminal of 21st century,” the official said, adding that as president, he may enjoy immunity from prosecution under international law but that would not last forever. A week ago, Zelensky said that he had created a “special mechanism” to investigate Russian “war crimes” in Ukraine, vowing to find and punish “everyone” responsible. The mechanism would include national and international experts, investigators, prosecutors and judges, he said.