(Paris) Situation on the ground, international reactions, sanctions: update on the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
Posted at 9:39
Updated at 1:10 p.m.
Zelensky accuses Russia of ‘genocide’
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday accused Russia of committing “genocide” in Ukraine to eliminate “the whole nation”, the day after the discovery of numerous bodies in the streets of Boutcha, a city northwest of Kyiv, after the departure of Russian forces.
Earlier Ukraine had accused the Russian army of having committed a “deliberate massacre” in Boutcha where nearly 300 people were buried in mass graves, according to the mayor of the city, Anatoly Fedorouk.
“We found mass graves. We found people with their hands and legs tied […] with bullet holes in the back of the head”, described for the BBC the spokesman for the Ukrainian president, Serguiï Nikiforovil, affirming that they were “clearly civilians”.
Moscow denies killing civilians
The Russian Ministry of Defense assured Sunday that its forces had not killed civilians in Boutcha. “During the period when this locality was under the control of the Russian armed forces, not a single local resident suffered from violent actions,” the ministry said.
He claimed that the images of corpses on the streets of the city were “a new production of the Kyiv regime for the Western media”.
Washington and NATO denounce “horrible” acts
The United States and NATO on Sunday expressed horror at reports of atrocities against civilians attributed to Russian forces in Boutcha.
“These images are a punch in the stomach,” reacted the head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken on the CNN channel.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg for his part considered that the violence in Boutcha was “horrible”, denouncing “brutality unprecedented in Europe for decades”.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz demanded that light be shed on the “crimes committed by the Russian army” in Boutcha, and called for new sanctions against Russia, while French President Emmanuel Macron affirmed that “the Russian authorities will have to answer of these crimes”.
Explosions in Odessa
A series of explosions rocked Odessa, Ukraine’s main port, on the Black Sea in the south-west of the country on Sunday morning, AFP journalists noted. They did not cause any casualties, according to the Ukrainian army.
Russia said it carried out strikes by “high-precision sea and land missiles” which it said “destroyed a refinery and three fuel and lubricant storage sites” near Odessa.
People flee Kramatorsk
Hundreds of people fled the city of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine on Sunday for fear of a possible Russian offensive in this part of the country, AFP noted.
They were hundreds, women, children and elderly people, to take the train from the station of this city under the control of the government of Kyiv.
Talks
The chief Russian negotiator in the peace talks with Ukraine, Vladimir Medinski, on Sunday welcomed a “more realistic” position according to him from Kyiv, ready under conditions to accept a neutral status for the country, demanded by Moscow.
“The Ukrainian side has taken a more realistic approach to issues related to Ukraine’s neutral and nuclear-free status,” Medinski said, adding that a proper draft agreement was not yet ready for submission. to the presidents of both countries.
Ukraine’s chief negotiator, David Arakhamia, said on Saturday that Moscow had “orally” accepted all Ukrainian positions, “except with regard to the Crimea issue”.
Many returns to Ukraine
More than 500,000 people have returned to Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry announced on Sunday.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for its part recorded on Saturday 4,176,401 Ukrainians who had left for abroad since the outbreak of the conflict.