“The Boutcha massacre was deliberate,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kouleba denounced on Sunday the day after the discovery of numerous corpses in this city northwest of kyiv, which had just been recaptured from the Russian army. The bodies of 57 people were found in a mass grave.
“The Boutcha massacre was deliberate. The Russians want to eliminate as many Ukrainians as they can. We must stop them and kick them out. I demand devastating new G7 sanctions NOW,” Ukraine’s business minister wrote foreigners Dmytro Kouleba on Twitter.
“kyiv region. Hell in the 21st century. The bodies of men and women who were killed with their hands tied. The worst crimes of Nazism are back in Europe. This was done deliberately by Russia”, tweeted an adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, Mykhaïlo Podoliak.
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AFP saw the lifeless bodies of at least 20 men in civilian clothes lying on a street in Boutcha on Saturday. One of the men had his hands tied and the bodies were strewn for several hundred yards.
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The cause of their death could not be determined immediately, but one person had a large head wound. “All these people were shot”, “they (the Russians) killed them with a bullet in the back of the neck”, assured AFP the mayor of Boutcha, Anatoly Fedorouk. “In Boutcha, we have already buried 280 people in mass graves” because it was impossible to do so in the three cemeteries of the municipality, all within firing range of the Russian soldiers, added Mr. Fedorouk.
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An investigation demanded
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss on Sunday denounced the “revolting acts” committed by the Russian army.
“As Russian troops are forced to retreat, we see growing evidence of the appalling acts committed by the invading forces in towns like Irpin and Boutcha,” Liz Truss said in a statement. These “indiscriminate attacks against innocent civilians” must be the subject of a “war crimes investigation”, she added.
Ukrainian forces were only able to completely penetrate Boutcha a few days ago, which had been inaccessible for almost a month.© Agence France-Presse