Month: April 2022

Associated Press

Lithuania cuts off Russian gas imports, urges EU to do same

Liudas Dapkus – April 3, 2022

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — Lithuania says it has cut itself off entirely of gas imports from Russia, apparently becoming the first of the European Union’s 27 nations using Russian gas to break its energy dependence upon Moscow.

“Seeking full energy independence from Russian gas, in response to Russia’s energy blackmail in Europe and the war in Ukraine, Lithuania has completely abandoned Russian gas,” Lithuania’s energy ministry said in a statement late Saturday, adding that the measure took effect in the beginning of April.

Lithuania managed to reduce imports of Russian gas to zero on Saturday, a move seen a milestone in achieving energy independence in the former Soviet republic of 2.8 million, the ministry said.

“We are the first EU country among Gazprom’s supply countries to gain independence from Russian gas supplies, and this is the result of a multi-year coherent energy policy and timely infrastructure decisions,” Minister of Energy Dainius Kreivys said.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda posted an upbeat tweet on his account and urged other European nations to do the same.

“From this month on — no more Russian gas in Lithuania. Years ago, my country made decisions that today allow us with no pain to break energy ties with the aggressor. If we can do it, the rest of Europe can do it too!” Nauseda tweeted.

In 2015, nearly 100% of Lithuania’s gas supplies derived from imports of Russian gas but the situation has changed drastically over the past years after the country built an off-shore LNG import terminal, launched in 2014, in the port city of Klaipeda.

The energy ministry said from now on all gas for Lithuania’s domestic consumption would be imported via Klaipeda’s LNG terminal.

Last year, some 26% of Lithuania’s gas supplies derived from deliveries from a Russian gas pipeline while 62% came via Klaipeda’s LNG terminal and the remaining 12% were imported from a gas storage in neighboring Latvia.

Baltic neighbors Latvia and Estonia are also heavily dependent on Russian gas but the operator of Latvia’s natural gas storage said none of the three Baltic states were importing Russian gas as of April 2.

Uldis Bariss, the CEO of Conexus Baltic Grid, told Latvian media on Saturday that the Baltic gas market was currently being served by gas reserves stored underground in Latvia.

Last month, Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte said Klaipeda’s LNG terminal wouldn’t have enough capacity to provide gas for all the three Baltic countries.

As a solution, Estonia’s government has proposed building a LNG terminal jointly with Latvia and Nordic neighbor Finland in the Estonian port town of Paldiski, which is not far from the capital, Tallinn.

Jari Tanner in Helsinki, Finland contributed to this report

Business Insider

Putin wants the West ‘disarmed’ into thinking his ambitions won’t go beyond Ukraine, says former NATO commander

Matthew Loh – April 3, 2022

• A former NATO allied commander said Russian President Vladimir Putin wants “control over eastern Europe.”
• Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark said the best way to protect NATO is thus to help Ukraine defeat Russia.
• He called on the US to strengthen military aid to Ukraine, especially fighter aircraft.

A former NATO commander has warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actual goals in attacking Ukraine are to establish “control over Eastern Europe” and “shatter” the alliance.

During an interview with CNN on Sunday, retired US four-star general Wesley Clark also urged the West to provide more arms to Kyiv.

“He wants Ukraine. He wants the Baltic states. He wants control over Eastern Europe. He wants to shatter NATO, and he wants the United States out,” he said.

Clark, who is a military analyst for CNN and served as NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe from 1997 to 2000, said Putin desires to “disrupt the international system” and have the West “emotionally” and “morally disarmed” into believing that his ambitions extend only to Ukraine.

He also called on the US and its NATO allies to bolster military aid for Ukraine, particularly with fighter aircraft — an area that the Pentagon has declined to help with, having rejected a Polish plan to supply Kyiv with MIG-29 jets.

“Ukraine is just the current battlefield. But if Ukrainians defeat Russia on this battlefield, everything changes,” Clark said. “So the best way to protect NATO, the best way to protect the international system is to give Ukraine the assistance it says it needs and let them handle Russia on the battlefield.”

While US military campaigns over the last 50 years involved helping countries “who weren’t that prepared to fight,” the war in Ukraine is different, he noted.

“Now we’ve got a first-world country. Their soldiers have education just as good as ours. They’re just as good technically as we are. We give them our modern weapons, they can use them in 24 hours,” Clark said.

“So we’re going to have to do a better job of listening to the Ukrainians for what they need and get them the equipment they say they need,” he added.

The retired general said that Russian forces would next seek to capture the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine to cut off Ukrainian troops in the Donbas area, where Moscow has recognized two separatist territories as independent states.

To drive off Russia’s advance to Dnipro, Ukraine would need “heavy fighting equipment” beyond what the US has supplied so far, Clark said.

“Not Javelins, not Stingers. That’s fine for helping defend cities. They need tanks, they need mobile artillery, they need lots of ammunition. They need fuel, they need repairs. We don’t have that for them,” he told CNN, referring to Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

The war in Ukraine is set to enter its 39th day on Monday. At least 1,417 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the fighting and bombardment plaguing the country, and 2,038 have been injured, according to the United Nations, which also noted that the actual figures are likely far higher.

Reuters

In Ukrainian street, a corpse with hands bound and a bullet wound to the head

Simon Gardner – April 3, 2022

BUCHA, Ukraine (Reuters) – A man lay sprawled by the roadside in the Ukrainian city of Bucha on Sunday, his hands tied behind his back and a bullet wound to his head, one of hundreds of local residents that officials say have been found dead in the wake of five weeks of Russian occupation.

Bucha’s deputy mayor, Taras Shapravskyi, said 50 of the dead residents, found after Russian forces withdrew from the city late last week, were the victims of extra-judicial killings carried out by Russian troops, and the officials have accused Moscow of war crimes.

Russia’s defense ministry said in a statement issued on Sunday that all photographs and videos published by the Ukrainian authorities alleging ‘crimes’ by Russian troops in Bucha were a “provocation,” and no resident of Bucha suffered violence at the hands of Russian troops.

Reuters was not able to independently verify who was responsible for killing the dead residents.

But three bodies seen by Reuters reporters on Sunday — the corpse with the hands bound and two others which did not have bound hands — bore bullet shots to the head consistent with what Bucha mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk and his deputy described as executions.

In all three cases, there were no signs of any other significant injuries elsewhere in the body. All three people shot in the head were male, and all three were dressed in civilian clothing.

On the body of the person whose hands were bound, there were powder burn marks on his lips and face. Such marks can mean a person was shot at close range.

The cloth used to bind the man’s hands appeared to be a white armband. Russian troops, while they were in Bucha, required that local residents wear the armbands to identify themselves, according to one woman who was still wearing hers.

Reuters sent questions to the Kremlin and the Russian defence ministry about the corpses that its reporters had witnessed, but received no immediate reply.

Russia’s defence ministry, in its statement on Sunday said: “During the time that Russian armed forces were in control of this settlement, not a single local resident suffered from any violent actions.” It added that before Russian troops withdrew on March 30 they delivered 452 tons of humanitarian aid to civilians around the Kyiv region.

Shapravskyi, the deputy mayor, said some 300 people were found dead after the Russian withdrawal. Of these, he said officials so far have logged 50 as executions carried out by Russian forces. Reuters could not independently verify those figures.

The others were either killed in crossfire, or their deaths are so far unexplained.

“Any war has some rules of engagement for civilians. The Russians have demonstrated that they were consciously killing civilians,” Fedoruk, the mayor, said as he showed Reuters reporters one of the bodies.

SHALLOW GRAVE

Reuters also spoke to one local resident who described a person being found dead after Russian troops detained them, and another resident who described two people found dead with single gunshot wounds to the head.

Reuters was not able to independently verify the descriptions provided by the residents.

Sobbing as she gestured at her husband’s shallow grave, a shot of vodka topped with a cracker resting on freshly dug earth, Tetyana Volodymyrivna recounted an ordeal at the hands of Russian troops in this city 37 km (23 miles) northwest of Kyiv.

She and her husband, a former Ukrainian marine, were dragged from their apartment when Russian troops set up their command centre in their building. The soldiers held them prisoner in the apartment building where they lived.

She said the Russians, when they arrived in the city, asked people who they were, and demanded to see documents.

She said a fighter with the Russian forces who she believed was from Russia’s semi-autonomous Chechnya region warned he would “cut us up.” She did not say how she knew he was Chechen.

Reuters sent a request for comment to the office of the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, a Kremlin loyalist, but received no reply.

Tetyana, who identified herself by her first name and patronymic but did not give her family name, was released after being held for four days. Her husband was nowhere to be seen for several days, until she was told about some bodies in a basement stairwell of the building where she and her husband lived.

“I recognised him by his sneakers, his trousers. He looked mutilated, his body was cold,” she said. “My neighbor still has a picture of his face. He had been shot in the head, mutilated, tortured.”

Reuters reviewed the photograph, which showed that the face and body were badly mutilated. The news agency could not determine if there was a bullet wound.

After recovering her husband’s body, she and some neighbours buried it in a garden plot near their building, just deep enough “so dogs wouldn’t eat him,” she said.

Another corpse still lay in the stairwell where her husband was found, a Reuters reporter saw. Local residents covered the body with a bedsheet as a mark of dignity.

“SHOT IN LEFT EYE”

Around the corner, another grave contained the remains of two men, a woman resident told Reuters. She said the men had been taken away by Russian troops. She did not witness them being killed. When the bodies were found, both had been shot through the left eye, she said. Six other residents gathered near the grave said her account was correct.

One of the residents said she recognised one of the dead men as a tenant in the apartment complex, who she said was a retired member of the Ukrainian military.

Bucha was captured in the days immediately after the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces who swept south, capturing the defunct nuclear reactor at Chernobyl and moving southwards toward the capital.

Bucha and the northern outskirts of nearby Irpin were the point at which the Russian advance from the northwest was halted after they met with unexpectedly fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces.

The area witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting of the battle for the capital, until Russian forces pulled back from north of Kyiv. Moscow said in late March it was regrouping to focus on battles in eastern Ukraine.

On Saturday, Ukraine said its forces had retaken all areas around Kyiv and that it now had complete control of the capital region for the first time since the invasion.

On Sunday, roads in Bucha were littered with unexploded ordnance. Rockets poked out of the tarmac near burned-out wrecks of tanks. Some residents scrawled “Beware, mines” on their walls in chalk after finding booby traps or missiles on their premises.

Resident Volodomir Kopachov said Russians troops had set up a rocket system in a vacant lot next to his garden. When a Reuters reporter visited, boxes of ammunition and spent shell casings littered the ground.

Kopachov, a Ukrainian dog breeder, was in mourning.

He said his 33-year-old daughter, her boyfriend and a friend were shot dead by Russian troops after firing a party streamer towards them just days before the pullback. Kopachov’s wife said they fired the streamer as a gesture of defiance, not with the intent of harming the soldiers.

“It is so hard to go through it all,” said the 69-year-old,” as 10 Alabai, a breed of prized Central Asian Shepherd dog, barked in his backyard.

Kopachov said he had not ventured beyond the gates of his house for a month. “They were killing [people] on the spot. No one asked: ‘who you are, why you are out?’. The men were simply shot.”

The Kremlin denies that it has invaded Ukraine, saying it is carrying out a “special military operation” to degrade the Ukrainian armed forces and is targeting military installations rather than carrying out strikes on civilian areas.

Speaking in Hostomel, near Bucha, on Sunday, Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said: “This is not a special operation, these are not police actions… These are inhumans who simply committed crimes against civilians.”

(The story has been refiled to correct a spelling in paragraph 3)

(Additional reporting by Zohra Bensemra and Sergiy Karazy; Editing by Christian Lowe)

Daily Beast

Horrific New Details of Carnage in Ukraine Town Emerge

Barbie Latza Nadeau, Corbin Bolies – April 3, 2022

This story contains graphic descriptions and images

Macabre new details have emerged about the Russian rampage through Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin’s forces are accused of indiscriminately killing civilians.

A survivor named Igor told The Insider one woman who was making food on the street was killed when she went inside as Russian soldiers walked by.

“They opened fire on her with an automatic rifle—they killed her right through the door,” Igor said. “I don’t know with whom they are fighting.”

Ukraine’s defense ministry tweeted horrific photos showing dead naked women, some of whom had been burned, along a road in Bucha, outside of Kyiv. Mass graves and corpses with gunshot wounds were also left behind.

Satellite images of Bucha show an approximately 45-foot-long trench dug around the grounds of the Church of St. Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints, according to satellite imagery that Maxar Technologies, a space technology company, shared with The Daily Beast. The images were captured March 31.

The carnage was a backdrop to a Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s declaration that Moscow is bent on “genocide” and a Human Rights Watch report detailing alleged war crimes by Russian soldiers.

Despite the shocking images and global outcry, Russia continued to pound Ukraine this weekend. Thick black smoke was seen billowing over the once-picturesque port of Odessa on Sunday morning after Russian strikes obliterated a fuel depot in the city that had previously see little fighting since the Russian invasion on Feb. 24. Both Russian and Ukrainian military confirmed the hit on their Telegram channels.

“This morning, high-precision sea and air-based missiles destroyed an oil refinery and three storage facilities for fuel and lubricants near the city of Odessa, from which fuel was supplied to the group of Ukrainian troops in the Mykolaiv direction,” the Russian military said in a statement on Telegram.

Odessa Mayor Hennadii Trukhanov confirmed the hit and said no one had died. “Today the occupiers struck Odessa’s critical infrastructure objects with missiles,” he said on a televised statement that ran on Ukrainian media channels, according to CNN. “There’s fire, there’s smoke. Luckily, there are no casualties. Only buildings are damaged. The situation is under control.”

As Russian troops continue to retreat, regroup and restock, they have left a macabre trail in their wake. Ukraine’s defense ministry tweeted horrific photos showing dead naked women, some of whom had been burned, along a road outside of Kyiv where Russian troops had been stationed. Mass graves and corpses with gunshot wounds shot at point blank range were also left behind.

The war, now entering its second month, shows no sign ending soon, in part thanks to Ukraine’s fierce resistance, backed by Western donations of money, war machinery, and ammunition. On Sunday, the U.K. Defense ministry applauded Ukrainian efforts, saying they had greatly hindered Russian air capability. “Russia’s inability to find and destroy air defence systems has seriously hampered their efforts to gain broad control of the air, which in turn has significantly affected their ability to support the advance of their ground forces on a number of fronts,” they tweeted.

Still, no one has claimed responsibility for a strike on a fuel depot in Belogrod, on Russian territory, after Russian military blamed Ukraine for what would be the first cross-border offensive if confirmed.

On Sunday, Ukraine added to their gains, reclaiming the ghost town of Pripyat, which has been abandoned since the 1986 meltdown of Chernobyl nearby, which Russian troops claimed early on. “Today, April 3, units of paratroopers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine took control of the area of the city of Pripyat and the area along the State Border of Ukraine with the Republic of Belarus,” Ukrainian military said in a Facebook post that included a photo of the Ukrainian flag flying overhead.

—Shannon Vavra contributed reporting.

Reuters

Patriarch urges soldiers to defend ‘peace-loving’ Russia amid Ukraine campaign

April 3, 2022

(Reuters) – The head of the Russian Orthodox Church held a service for Russian soldiers on Sunday in which he called on them to defend their country “as only Russians can” as Moscow continues its military campaign in Ukraine.

At the lavishly decorated Main Cathedral of the Armed Forces opened two years ago in Kubinka outside Moscow, Patriarch Kirill told a group of servicemen and servicewomen that Russia was a “peace-loving” country that had suffered greatly from war.

“We absolutely do not strive for war or to do anything that could harm others,” said the patriarch, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin.

“But we have been raised throughout our history to love our fatherland. And we will be ready to protect it, as only Russians can defend their country.”

Kirill, 75, has previously made statements defending Moscow’s actions in Ukraine and sees the war as a bulwark against a Western liberal culture that he considers decadent, particularly over the acceptance of homosexuality.

His support for the military intervention, in which thousands of soldiers and Ukrainian civilians have been killed, has angered some within the Orthodox church at home as well as in churches abroad linked to the Moscow Patriarchate.

At his sermon on Sunday, Patriarch Kirill said he also felt concern for the people affected by the armed conflict.

“All these are people of Holy Russia,” he said. “They are our brothers and sisters.”

Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what it called a special operation to degrade its neighbour’s military and root out what it called dangerous nationalists. It depicts Ukraine as a potential bridgehead for the Western NATO alliance and a direct threat to Russia.

Ukraine and the Western countries supporting it reject that as a baseless pretext for a war of aggression. Ukrainian forces have mounted stiff resistance and the West has imposed sweeping sanctions in an effort to force Russia to withdraw its forces.

(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Politico

Ukraine accuses Russia of massacre, city strewn with bodies

Associated Press – April 3, 2022

BUCHA, Ukraine — Bodies with bound hands, close-range gunshot wounds and signs of torture lay scattered in a city on the outskirts of Kyiv after Russian soldiers withdrew from the area. Ukrainian authorities on Sunday accused the departing forces of committing war crimes and leaving behind a “scene from a horror movie.”

As images of the bodies — of people whom residents said were killed indiscriminately — began to emerge from Bucha, a slew of European leaders condemned the atrocities and called for tougher sanctions against Moscow.

The bodies of 410 civilians have been removed from Kyiv-area towns that were recently retaken from Russian forces, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, Iryna Venediktova, said.

Associated Press journalists saw the bodies of at least 21 people in various spots around Bucha, northwest of the capital. One group of nine, all in civilian clothes, were scattered around a site that residents said Russian troops used as a base. They appeared to have been killed at close range. At least two had their hands tied behind their backs and one of those was shot in the head; another’s legs were bound.

Ukrainian officials laid the blame for the killings — which they said happened in Bucha and other Kyiv suburbs — squarely at the feet of Russian troops, with the president calling them evidence of genocide. But Russia’s Defense Ministry rejected the accusations as “provocation.”

The discoveries followed the Russian retreat from the area around the capital, territory that has seen heavy fighting since troops invaded Ukraine from three directions on Feb. 24. Troops who swept in from Belarus to the north spent weeks trying to clear a path to Kyiv, but their advance stalled in the face of resolute defense from Ukraine’s forces.

Moscow now says it is focusing its offensive on the country’s east, but it also pressed a siege on a city in the north and continued to strike cities elsewhere in a war that has already forced more than 4 million Ukrainians to flee their country and many more to leave their homes.

Russian troops rolled into Bucha in the early days of the invasion and stayed up March 30. With those forces gone, residents gave harrowing accounts Sunday, saying soldiers shot and killed civilians without any apparent reason.

One resident, who refused to give his name fearing for his safety, said that Russian troops went building to building and took people out of the basements where they were hiding, checking their phones for any evidence of anti-Russian activity and taking them away or shooting them.

Hanna Herega, a resident of Bucha, said Russian troops shot a neighbor who had gone out to gather wood for heating.

“He went to get some wood when all of a sudden they (Russians) started shooting. They hit him a bit above the heel, crushing the bone, and he fell down,” Herega said. “Then they shot off his left leg completely, with the boot. Then they shot him all over (the chest). And another shot went slightly below the temple. It was a controlled shot to the head.”

The AP also saw two bodies, that of a man and a woman, wrapped in plastic that residents said they had covered and placed in a shaft until a proper funeral could be arranged.

The resident who refused to be identified said the man was killed as he left a home.

“He put his hands up, and they shot him,” he said.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said scores of residents were found slain on the streets of the suburbs of Irpin and Hostomel as well as Bucha, in what looked like a “scene from a horror movie.”

He alleged that some of the women found dead had been raped before being killed and the Russians then burned the bodies.

“This is genocide,” Zelenskyy told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

But Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that the photos and videos of dead bodies “have been stage managed by the Kyiv regime for the Western media.” It noted that Bucha’s mayor did not mention any abuses a day after Russian troops left.

The ministry charged said “not a single civilian has faced any violent action by the Russian military” in Bucha.

Over the weekend, AP journalists witnessed Ukrainian soldiers gingerly removing at least six bodies from a street in Bucha with cables in case the Russians had booby-trapped corpses with explosives before their withdrawal.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko called on other nations to immediately end Russian gas imports, saying they were funding the killings.

“Not a penny should go to Russia anymore,” Klitschko told German newspaper Bild. “That’s bloody money used to slaughter people. The gas and oil embargo must come immediately.”

Officials in France, Germany, Italy, Estonia and the U.K. separately condemned what was being described and vowed that Russia would be held accountable.

“This is not a battlefield, it’s a crime scene,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas tweeted.

Authorities said they were documenting evidence to add to their case for prosecuting Russian officials for war crimes.

As Russian forces retreated from the area around the capital, they pressed their sieges in other parts of the country. Russia has said it is directing troops to the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years.

In that region, Mariupol, a port on the Sea of Azov that has seen some of the war’s greatest suffering, remained cut off. About 100,000 civilians — less than a quarter of the prewar population of 430,000 — are believed to be trapped there with little or no food, water, fuel and medicine.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Sunday that a team sent Saturday to help evacuate residents had yet to reach the city.

Ukrainian authorities said Russia agreed days ago to allow safe passage from the city, but similar agreements have broken down repeatedly under continued shelling.

A supermarket parking lot in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, meanwhile, has become the staging ground for helping people who have made it out.

Peycheva Olena, who fled the besieged city, told Britain’s Sky News she was forced to leave the body of her husband unburied when he was killed in shooting.

“There was shelling, and we tried to drag him away but it was too much, we couldn’t do it,” explained her daughter, Kristina Katrikova.

The mayor of Chernihiv, which also has been under attack for weeks, said Sunday that relentless Russian shelling has destroyed 70% of the northern city. Like in Mariupol, Chernihiv has been cut off from shipments of food and other supplies.

On Sunday morning, Russian forces launched missiles on the Black Sea port of Odesa, in southern Ukraine, sending up clouds of dark smoke that veiled parts of the city. The Russian military said the targets were an oil processing plant and fuel depots around Odesa, which is Ukraine’s largest port and home to its navy.

The Odesa city council said Ukraine’s air defense shot down some missiles before they hit the city. Ukrainian military spokesman Vladyslav Nazarov said there were no casualties from the attack.

The regional governor in Kharkiv, said Sunday that Russian artillery and tanks performed over 20 strikes on Ukraine’s second-largest city and its outskirts in the country’s northeast over the past day.

The head of Ukraine’s delegation in talks with Russia said Moscow’s negotiators informally agreed to most of a draft proposal discussed during face-to-face talks in Istanbul this week, but no written confirmation has been provided.

The Ukrainian negotiator, Davyd Arakhamia said on Ukrainian TV that he hoped the proposal was developed enough so Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin could meet to discuss it. But the top Russian negotiator in talks with Ukraine, Vladimir Medinksy, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying it was too early to talk about a meeting between the two leaders.

The New York Times

‘This Is True Barbarity’: Life and Death Under Russian Occupation

Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Natalia Yermak – April 3, 2022

TROSTYANETS, Ukraine — The last three Russian soldiers in this Ukrainian town are in the morgue, their uniforms bloodied and torn. The first one’s face is frozen in pain. The second has his wooden pipe in his lap. The third is stuffed in his sleeping bag.

These dead are not all that was left behind in Trostyanets, a strategically located town in the country’s northeast, where Russian forces fled several days ago in the face of an orchestrated Ukrainian assault. A monthlong Russian occupation reduced much of the town to rubble, a decimated landscape of mangled tank hulks, snapped trees and rattled but resilient survivors.

There are also stories, impossible to verify, highlighting the kind of hate left in an occupation’s wake and sharing a common thread of brutality: children held at knifepoint; an old woman forced to drink alcohol as her occupiers watched and laughed; whispers of rape and forced disappearances; and an old man found toothless, beaten in a ditch and defecated on.

“Oh, God, how I wanted to spit on them or hit them,” said Yevdokiya Koneva, 57, her voice steely as she pushed her aging bicycle toward the center of town Friday.

Ukrainian forces are gaining ground, as more than a month into the war, Russian forces are pulling back from their positions north of Kyiv, the capital, even as Ukrainian soldiers are making progress here in the northeast. This area was supposed to be little more than a speed bump for a sprawling military campaign that would quickly take the country’s capital and leave the east in Russian hands.

Instead, a combination of logistics issues, low morale and poor planning among Russian forces allowed an emboldened Ukrainian military to go on the offensive along multiple axes, grinding down the occupying forces and splintering their front lines.

The Ukrainian victory in Trostyanets came March 26 — what residents call “Liberation Day” — and is an example of how disadvantaged and smaller Ukrainian units have launched successful counterattacks.

It also shows how the Russian military’s inability to win a quick victory — in which it would “liberate” a friendly population — left its soldiers in a position that they were vastly unprepared for: holding an occupied town with an unwelcoming local populace.

“We didn’t want this dreadful ‘liberation,’ ” said Nina Ivanivna Panchenko, 64, who was walking in the rain after collecting a package of humanitarian aid. “Just let them never come here again.”

Interviews with more than a dozen residents of Trostyanets, a modest town of about 19,000 situated in a bowl of rolling hills roughly 20 miles from the Russian border, paint a stark picture of struggle and fear during the Russian occupation. The unrelenting violence from both Ukrainian and Russian forces fighting to retake and hold the town raged for weeks and drove people into basements or anywhere they could find shelter.

On Friday, dazed residents walked through what is left of their city, sorting through the debris as some power was restored for the first time in weeks. Viktor Panov, a railway worker, was helping to clear the shrapnel-shattered train station of unexploded shells, grenades and other scattered explosives. Other men cannibalized destroyed Russian armored vehicles for parts or working machinery.

“I can’t wrap my head around how this war with tanks and missiles is possible,” said Olena Volkova, 57, the head doctor at the hospital and the deputy head of the town council. “Against who? The peaceful civilians?

“This is true barbarity,” she said.

The war began in Trostyanets on Feb. 24, the day the Russians launched their invasion of Ukraine. The town quickly became a thoroughfare for advancing Russian tank columns as they punched farther west, part of their northeastern offensive toward Kyiv. Thousands of armored vehicles rolled through, breaking highway guard rails and chewing up roads.

“As the Russians drove in, for the first two days, our guys fought back well, so long as they had heavy weapons,” Panov, 37, said. “After they ran out of those, they were left only with rifles.”

Farther west, the offensive blitz toward Kyiv soon encountered fierce Ukrainian resistance, stopping the Russians short of the capital, meaning that soldiers would have to occupy Trostyanets rather than just move through it. Roughly 800 troops fanned out, constructing a dozen or so checkpoints that cut the town into a grid of isolated neighborhoods.

Residents say they rarely tried to move through the Russian positions, although they described the occupying soldiers as amiable enough in the first days of the occupation and more confused than anything.

“The first brigade of Russian forces that came in were more or less tolerable,” Volkova said. “They said, ‘OK, we will help you.’ ”

That help, Volkova explained, was just allowing them to pull corpses off the streets. She added that roughly 20 people had been killed during the occupation and the ensuing fighting — 10 had suffered gunshot wounds.

On a few occasions, the Russian troops opened “green corridors” for civilians to leave the town, although that was when some people — mostly younger, military-age men — were abducted.

Early in the occupation, Trostyanets’ police officers took off their uniforms and blended into the populace. Those who were in Ukraine’s Territorial Defense, the equivalent of the National Guard, slipped out to the town’s periphery and worked as partisans — documenting Russian troop movement and reporting it to the Ukrainian military.

Others remained in the town, quietly moving to help residents when they could, even as Russian soldiers hunted them. “We were here during the whole time of occupation, working to the best of our abilities,” explained the police chief, Volodymyr Bogachyov, 53.

As the days and weeks went by, food became scarce, and any goodwill from the soldiers vanished, too. Residents boiled snow for water and lived off what they had stored from their small gardens. Russian soldiers, without a proper logistics pipeline, began looting people’s homes, shops and even the local chocolate factory. One butcher spray-painted “ALREADY LOOTED” on his shop so the soldiers would not break in. On another store, another deterrence: “EVERYTHING IS TAKEN, NOTHING LEFT.”

By mid-March, the Russian soldiers were rotated out of the town and replaced by separatist fighters who were brought in from the southeast.

It was then, residents said, that atrocities began to mount.

“They were brash and angry,” Volkova said. “We could not negotiate with them about anything. They would not give us any green corridors; they searched the apartments, took away the phones, abducted people — they took them away, mostly young men, and we still don’t know where these people are.”

As of Friday, the town’s police had received 15 reports of missing people.

In the morgue, beside the three dead Russian soldiers, Volkova pointed to a body bag in the corner of the room. “This person was tortured to death,” she said. “His hands and legs are tied up with sticky tape, his teeth are missing, and almost all of his face is gone. It’s unknown what they wanted from him.”

Outside the town, Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade, a unit of experienced veterans who had seen combat off and on in the country’s separatist regions for the past seven years, slowly moved into position. Then, March 23, they attacked with a bombardment of artillery fire.

The next day, the town’s hospital was shelled. It is not entirely clear who hit the building, but local residents accuse the Russians of firing into the structure. The hospital had been operational for the duration of the occupation, treating everyone, including Russian soldiers. During the shelling, only one doctor and one nurse were still working there, and they moved into the basement with patients.

“In the morning, we went away on foot with the last two women still remaining in the maternity ward, one pregnant and one that had just given birth,” said Xenia Gritsayenko, 45, a midwife who had returned to work Friday to clean up the ward. Tank shells had gone through the walls, shredding baby posters and lighting at least one room on fire. “It was the cry from the bottom of the soul.”

The Russian forces fled on the night of the 25th. Their demolished artillery position in the train station square showed signs of an undersupplied and ad hoc force. Fortifications included ammunition crates loaded with sand and thick candy bar wrappers bundled in rolls and used to shore up shattered windows instead of sandbags. Uniforms lay in soaked puddles. Russian supply documents blew aimlessly in the wind.

A nearby monument that commemorates the World War II victory to retake the town, affixed with an aging Soviet tank, was damaged, but not destroyed. It had survived one more battle.

By Friday afternoon, Bogachyov was sorting through reports of townspeople who had collaborated with the former occupiers, as well as trying to address continued looting. Yet no one had issues siphoning fuel from the abandoned Russian tanks dotting the roads.

“The info is such as, ‘This person was talking or drinking vodka with the Russians,’ and ‘This person pointed to them where is the home of the person they were looking for,’” he said.

“There is no information on collaborations such as our citizens taking arms along with the occupants or treating their own citizens with violence,” Bogachyov said, acknowledging that it was hard to tell if he was contending with Russian spies or just neighborly grudges.

The morning rain had burned off by the afternoon. The long lines around humanitarian aid distribution points dissipated. A garbage truck meandered by, loaded to the brim with war detritus and Russian army rations. A few people took selfies in front of the last Russian piece of self-propelled artillery that was still recognizable.

Galyna Mitsaii, 65, an employee of the local seed and gardening supplies shop near the train station, slowly restocked her shelves, pleased at how the day’s weather had turned out.

“We will sow; we will grow; we will live,” she said, crying.

Reuters

Human Rights Watch accuses Russian forces of ‘apparent war crimes’ in Ukraine

Stephen Farrell – April 3, 2022

LVIV, Ukraine (Reuters) -A leading rights group said on Sunday it had documented “apparent war crimes” committed by Russian military forces against civilians in Ukraine.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a statement saying it had found “several cases of Russian military forces committing laws-of-war violations” in Russian-controlled regions such as Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Kyiv.

The statement, published in Warsaw, came one day after dead civilians were found lying scattered through the streets of the Ukrainian country town of Bucha near Kyiv, three days after the Russian army pulled back from a month-long occupation.

Russia’s defence ministry denied on Sunday that its forces had killed civilians in Bucha. It said in a statement that all Russian units had left the town on March 30, and that footage and photographs showing dead bodies were “yet another provocation”.

The ministry did not immediately respond to the specific allegations in the HRW statement.

The Kremlin says its “special military operation” aims to degrade the Ukrainian armed forces and is targeting military installations, not civilians.

Asked about separate war crime allegations on March 1, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with reporters: “We categorically deny this.” He dismissed allegations of Russian strikes on civilian targets and the use of cluster bombs and vacuum bombs as fakes.

The New York-based HRW referred to Bucha in its statement, for which it said it had interviewed 10 people including witnesses, victims and local residents, in person or by phone. It said some had been too scared to give their full names.

“The cases we documented amount to unspeakable, deliberate cruelty and violence against Ukrainian civilians,” said Hugh Williamson, HRW’s Europe and Central Asia director.

“Rape, murder, and other violent acts against people in the Russian forces’ custody should be investigated as war crimes.”

These, it said, included one case of repeated rape; two cases of summary execution – one of six men – and other cases of unlawful violence and threats against civilians between Feb. 27 and March 14.

“Soldiers were also implicated in looting civilian property, including food, clothing, and firewood. Those who carried out these abuses are responsible for war crimes,” the report said.

Reuters was not immediately able to verify the HRW evidence.

HRW said that, on March 4, Russian forces in Bucha had “rounded up five men and summarily executed one of them”.

Reuters journalists visited Bucha on Saturday and Sunday, after being given access by Ukrainian forces who recaptured the area, and saw bodies wearing no military uniforms scattered in the streets.

On Sunday, Bucha’s mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, showed a Reuters team two corpses with white cloth tied around their arms, which the mayor said residents had been forced to wear during the month that Russian forces occupied the city.

Northeast of Kyiv in the Chernihiv region, the report said, Russian forces in Staryi Bykiv rounded up at least six men on Feb. 27, later executing them. It cited the mother of one of the men, who said she was nearby when her son was captured and who later saw the bodies of all six men.

HRW said all parties to the armed conflict in Ukraine were obligated to abide by international law and the laws of war.

“Russia has an international legal obligation to impartially investigate alleged war crimes by its soldiers,” Williamson said.

(Additional reporting by Silvia Aloisi; Editing by Frances Kerry and Kevin Liffey)

Business Insider

Nearly 300 people were buried in mass graves in Bucha, where the streets are ‘littered with corpses,’ a Ukrainian mayor said

Katie Balevic – April 3, 2022

Nearly 300 people have been buried in mass graves in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, the town’s mayor said on Saturday.

Bucha stands just outside of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, a target of the Russian invaders.

On Sunday, the US embassy in Kyiv said the images from Bucha were “horrific” and called for action.

Nearly 300 people have been buried in mass graves in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, just outside of Kyiv, the town’s mayor said.

“In Bucha, we have already buried 280 people in mass graves,” Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk told AFP News Agency by phone. Fedoruk said the streets are “littered with corpses,” according to the news agency.

AFP journalists reported earlier on Saturday that they saw at least 20 bodies in civilian clothes laying on a single street in Bucha.

“Corpses of executed people still line the Yabluska street in Bucha. Their hands are tied behind their backs with white ‘civilian’ rags, they were shot in the back of their heads. So you can imagine what kind of lawlessness they perpetrated here,” Bucha mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk told Reuters, according to CNN.

The US embassy in Kyiv called the images from Bucha “horrific.”

“The U.S. government is committed to pursuing accountability using every tool available. We can not stand quiet, the world needs to know what happened, and we all must act,” the embassy said in a tweeted statement.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of “genocide” and war crimes.

“Indeed, this is genocide,” Zelenskyy said on Sunday. “The elimination of the whole nation and the people. We are the citizens of Ukraine we have over 100 nationalities. This is about the destruction and extermination of all these nationalities.”

The European Union condemned “atrocities” by Russian forces following reports of mass casualties in Bucha.

“Shocked by news of atrocities committed by Russian forces. EU assists Ukraine in documenting war crimes,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell tweeted on Sunday. He added that the “EU assists Ukraine in documenting war crimes” and “all cases must be pursued.”

Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba called on the International Criminal Court to visit Bucha “to collect all the evidence of these war crimes,” the Washington Post reported.

Russian forces have been trying to seize the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv since the invasion began on February 24, but have been met with fierce resistance across the country. The death toll has been high on both sides, prompting the use of mass graves in other Ukrainian cities, such as Mariupol.

Last week, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced that it would reduce its military assaults on Kyiv, although the United States has remained skeptical of those claims. Ukraine’s Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar said on Saturday that the country had regained control of the “whole Kyiv region,” per AFP.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned on Saturday that retreating Russian troops were leaving mines around Ukrainian homes and “even the bodies of those killed,” creating a “catastrophic” situation for civilians, the Associated Press reported.

“It’s still not possible to return to normal life, as it used to be, even at the territories that we are taking back after the fighting,” Zelenskyy said, per AP. “We need wait until our land is demined, wait till we are able to assure you that there won’t be new shelling.”

Business Insider

Video appears to show a Russian attack helicopter being split in half by a British hi-tech missile fired by Ukrainian fighters

Alia Shoaib – April 3, 2022

• A video appears to show a UK anti-aircraft missile shooting down a Russian helicopter in Ukraine.
• The UK reportedly sent a team of Starstreak operators to a secret location in a neighboring country to train Ukrainian forces.
• Russia’s ambassador to the UK said that British weapons supplied to Ukraine are “legitimate targets.”

A British anti-aircraft missile has been used to shoot down a Russian helicopter in Ukraine for the first time, reports say.

Footage shows the Starstreak high-velocity missile system striking a Russian Mi-28N attack helicopter over the Luhansk region, eastern Ukraine, causing its tail to snap off mid-air and splitting the aircraft in half.

Starstreak is Britain’s most advanced operated portable missile system, and the UK sent a cosignment to Ukraine in March along with another shipment of Next Generation Light Anti-tank Weapons (NLAWs).

A British Ministry of Defense source told The Times of London that it believed the video showed Starstreak in action.

The weapon is guided onto its target by three laser beam darts, according to The Times. The missile accelerates to Mach 4 (3,000 mph) and is the fastest short-range missile in existence.

It can be fired from a stand or shoulder launcher and can strike targets up to 7km, or over 4 miles, away, the paper said.

Because of the complexity of using it, troops must have 1,000 successful hits on a simulator before they are allowed to launch a live missile.

To help Ukrainians master the weapon, the British Ministry of Defense sent a team of Starstreak operators and a simulator to a secret location in a neighboring country for training, The Times reported.

Although British operators had planned to spend two to three weeks intensively training Ukrainian troops, its use this week suggests that soldiers have learned how to use it in just one or two weeks, the paper said.

The British Ministry of Defense source told The Times that the anti-aircraft system had been deployed for nearly a week.

Russia’s ambassador to the UK told Russian news agency TASS on Saturday that British weapons supplies to Ukraine are “legitimate targets” for the Russian army.

Ambassador Andrey Kelin said that supplying arms such as Starstreak missiles is “destabilizing.”

“They exacerbate the situation, making it even bloodier. Apparently, those are new, high-precision weapons,” Kelin told the news agency.

“Naturally, our armed forces will view them as a legitimate target if those supplies get through the Ukrainian border.”