Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russian forces of attempting to launch a “false campaign” to “hide the traces of their crimes” in the country.
In an emotional address to the country on Monday evening, Mr Zelensky linked the denials of Russian atrocities after reports emerged of mass graves of civilians in cities like Bucha and Mariupol to “the same tactics” used after Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 had crashed in the rebel-controlled Donbas region in 2014.
“They are already launching a false campaign to conceal their guilt in the mass killings of civilians in Mariupol. They will do dozens of stage[d] interviews, re-edited recordings, and will kill people specifically to make it look like they were killed by someone else,” the president said.
“Probably, now the occupiers will try to hide the traces of their crimes. They did not do this in Bucha when they retreated. But in another area it is possible,” he added.
“They used the same tactics when the occupiers shot down a Malaysian Boeing over Donbas. They blamed Ukraine. They even came up with various conspiracy theories. They even went so far as to claim that the corpses were ‘thrown’ on board the plane before it crashed.”
Mr Zelensky said officials were documenting the atrocities committed on civilians.
“We have just begun an investigation into all that the occupiers have done. At present, there is information about more than three hundred people killed and tortured in Bucha alone,” Mr Zelensky said.
He emphasised that the number of victims of the “occupiers” may be even higher in Borodyanka and some other liberated cities and claimed the crimes were at a scale not seen even during the Nazi occupation.
“In many villages of the liberated districts of the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions, the occupiers did things that the locals had not seen even during the Nazi occupation 80 years ago. The occupiers will definitely bear responsibility for this,” he said.
“It is likely that the list of victims [in Bucha] will be much larger when the whole city is checked. And this is only one city.”
Mr Zelensky also remarked on the trail of destruction left behind because of the invasion.
“Cities are simply ruined. Burnt military equipment on the roads, destroyed cars. It is especially hard to look at the traces of bullets on cars with the inscription ‘Children’,” he further said.
“We must also be aware that after the revealed mass killings of civilians in the Kyiv region, the occupiers may have a different attitude to their crimes in another part of our country where they came.”
Mr Zelensky called on western leaders to impose further sanctions on Vladimir Putin’s regime and added that the punishments “must finally be powerful.”
He said that Ukraine is “doing everything possible to identify all the Russian military involved in these crimes as soon as possible. Everything to punish them. This will be a joint work of our state with the European Union and international institutions, in particular with the International Criminal Court.”
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