War in Ukraine, Day 66 | Other tortured bodies found in Boutcha, the Russians attack the east

(Kyiv, Kharkiv) Ukrainian police announced on Saturday the discovery of a new mass grave with the bodies of three men with their hands tied, tortured and then executed near Boutcha, a small town near Kyiv that has become the symbol of atrocities attributed to Russia , whose forces continued to shell the east of the country and gradually gain ground there.

Coming out of the reserve that is usually the lot of the military, the spokesman for the Pentagon, John Kirby, had publicly questioned the day before about the “depravity” of Russian President Vladimir Putin, admitting that it was “difficult to watch certain images” of atrocities committed against Ukrainian civilians.

“The victims were tortured for a long time […] In the end, each of them was shot in the temple,” Kyiv region police chief Andriy Nebytov said in a statement on Saturday about the three bodies found in a grave the day before in Myrotske, a village near Boutcha.

“The victims had their hands tied, clothes around their faces so they couldn’t see anything and some had gags in their mouths,” he added, indicating that the bodies bore signs of torture.

Survivors of the occupation of Boutcha in March by the Russian forces which tried in vain to take Kyiv told AFP this week of the prisoners on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs, the summary executions and the pools of blood in the houses.

Those who saw “will remember it for hundreds of years”, said Viktor Chatylo, a resident of Yablounska Street, where AFP had noted, on April 2, the presence of around twenty corpses of civilians. after the departure of the Russian forces.

“No one knows how many”

The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, estimated at 900 Friday, in an interview with the Polish press, the number of bodies discovered in the Boutcha area.

With Russian soldiers burning and burying bodies, “nobody knows how many people perished”, he added.

The Ukrainian public prosecutor’s office has already announced the indictment of ten Russian soldiers, the listing of more than 8,000 war crimes in Ukraine, and the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who visited Boutcha on Thursday , urged Moscow to “cooperate” with the investigation of the International Criminal Court.

But Moscow denied any responsibility and spoke of a “staging”. The Russian army went so far as to strike Kyiv while Mr. Guterres was there, killing a journalist and triggering a chorus of international protests.

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Saturday, after a telephone conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart, that “the mission of French experts contributing to the collection of evidence to fight against impunity and enable the work of international justice relating to crimes committed within the framework of the Russian aggression”.

He added that France would “reinforce” its shipments of military equipment to Ukraine – including long-range guns – to “restore Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.

On the ground, after defeating the Russian army in its offensive launched on February 24 on Kyiv, the Ukrainian forces are now struggling to contain the push into the east of the country by an army in numerical superiority and for the moment better armed, which seeks to take them in a vice from the north and the south.

Volodymyr Zelensky notably acknowledged on Friday evening that the situation in the Kharkiv region, the country’s second largest city near the Russian border, was “difficult”.

Violent explosions were heard on Friday night in the city, pounded for weeks by Russian artillery. The bombardments left one dead and several injured on Friday.

“If it was a war of infantry against infantry, we would have chances. But in this sector, it’s first of all an artillery war and we don’t have enough of it,” “Viking”, a 27-year-old staff sergeant who retired from Kreminna, told AFP. , eastern city taken by the Russians on April 18.

Westerners, including the United States, France and Britain, have promised hundreds of howitzers to the Ukrainians, but time is running out.

Objectives “will be achieved”

All the objectives of the “special military operation” – term used by the Kremlin for this war – “will be achieved despite the obstruction of our adversaries”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with the ‘Chinese official news agency China released on Saturday.

He called on Westerners to stop their arms deliveries to Ukraine “if they are really interested in resolving the crisis”.

The Ukrainian army, however, managed to achieve “tactical” successes, Volodymyr Zelensky underlined, such as in Rouska Lozova, a village recaptured north of Kharkiv, from where Russian forces were pounding the city. More than 600 residents have been evacuated from the village, which has been occupied for two months, according to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.

Ukraine has also allowed itself to strike strategic targets on Russian territory.

The governor of the Russian region of Bryansk, in northeastern Ukraine, Alexander Bogomaz, announced on Telegram that the air defense had “detected a plane of the Ukrainian armed forces” Saturday at 6:50 a.m. local time, and that two shells had damaged oil installations.

Several fuel reserves in Russian territory have been the target of apparent intrusions by Ukrainian forces in recent weeks, although Kyiv refuses to confirm its involvement.

In the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine, 14 attacks launched by Russian forces have also been repelled in the past 24 hours, the Ukrainian forces’ general staff said on Saturday.

A longer offensive

A senior Pentagon official noted on Friday that if the Russian forces were “far from having made the connection” of the troops entering through the Kharkiv region, north of Donbass, with those coming from the south of the country to take the forces deployed on the front line around the separatist areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, they continued “to create the conditions for a sustained, broader and longer offensive”.

In Mariupol, a large port city in the south-east, an evacuation operation for civilians scheduled for Friday did not take place.

Denis Pushilin, head of the separatist eastern region of Donetsk, accused Ukrainian forces of “acting like outright terrorists” and holding civilians hostage at the Azovstal metallurgical complex.

Several hundred Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are entrenched in underground galleries in Azovstal.

AFP was able to hear heavy shelling in Azovstal on Friday morning and until mid-afternoon, during a press trip to Mariupol organized by the Russian army.

On the diplomatic front, while the Russian president was invited like his Ukrainian counterpart to the G20 summit scheduled for November in Indonesia, the United States said it refused to deal with Vladimir Putin “as if nothing had happened”.

14 Ukrainians freed

Fourteen Ukrainians, including a pregnant woman, have been freed in a new prisoner exchange with Russia, Kyiv announced on Saturday, without as usual revealing the number of Russians who have been handed over to Moscow.

“Today, we proceeded to a new exchange of prisoners. Fourteen of ours are returning home, seven soldiers and seven civilians. One of the servicewomen is five months pregnant,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on Telegram.

In an interview with the BBC on Friday, M^me Vereshchuk accused Russia of “deporting” large numbers of civilians across the border and using them as “hostages”.

“They captured all these hostages — civilians, women, local council workers, to try to use them,” she said. “We know there are over a thousand hostages there, including nearly 500 women,” she said. “We know that they are in prisons and in remand centers in Kursk, in Bryansk, in Ryazan, in Rostov”.

M^me Vereshchuk also mentioned the difficulty of getting the women released.

“Now we refuse to arrange an exchange without any women on the list. This is how we somehow try to save our women and our civilians,” she said.

Several prisoner exchanges have taken place between Kyiv and Moscow since Russia launched its February 24 invasion of Ukraine.