Russia launches new attacks as investigators gather evidence of ‘war crimes’

Russian forces have carried out new attacks in Ukraine, as police and other investigators walked the streets of ruined towns around Ukraine’s capital documenting widespread killings of unarmed civilians and other alleged war crimes.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has kept up demands for war crimes trials for Russian troops and their leaders, while warning they were regrouping for fresh assaults on Ukraine’s east and south.

Overnight, Russian forces attacked a fuel depot and a factory in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, the region’s governor Valentyn Reznichenko said. The number of casualties was unclear.

“The night was alarming and difficult. The enemy attacked our area from the air and hit the oil depot and one of the plants. The oil depot with fuel was destroyed. Rescuers are still putting out the flames at the plant,” he wrote.

In the eastern Luhansk region, shelling of the city of Rubizhne on Tuesday killed one person and injured five more, governor Serhiy Haidai said.

Ukraine’s military has said Russian troops were preparing for an offensive in Ukraine’s east, “to establish complete control over the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk regions”.

Parts of the two regions have been under control of Russia-backed rebels since 2014 and are recognised by Moscow as independent states.

Ukrainian forces have been holding back Russian troops trying to push east but remain outnumbered in troops and equipment, Mr Zelensky said in a video address to his country late on Tuesday.

“But we don’t have a choice — the fate of our land and of our people is being decided,” he said. “We know what we are fighting for. And we will do everything to win.”

Over the past few days, a global outcry has been raised over what appear to be intentional killings of civilians in Bucha and other towns before Russian forces withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv.

The evidence led western nations to expel scores of Moscow’s diplomats and propose further sanctions.

The US, in co-ordination with the European Union and G7, is expected to roll out more sanctions on Wednesday, including a ban on all new investment in Russia, a senior administration official said.

The European Commission proposed a ban on coal imports from Russia, which are an estimated 4 billion euros (£3.3 billion) per year. It would be the first time the 27-nation bloc has sanctioned the country’s lucrative energy industry over the war.

Speaking by video on Tuesday to the UN Security Council, Mr Zelensky said civilians in towns around Kyiv had been tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown down wells, blown up with grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while in cars.

Those who carried out the killings and those who gave the orders “must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes” in front of a tribunal similar to the one established at Nuremberg after the Second World War, he said.

Moscow’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said “not a single local person” suffered from violence while Bucha was under Russian control, and claimed video footage of bodies in the streets was “a crude forgery” staged by the Ukrainians.

“You only saw what they showed you,” he said. “The only ones who would fall for this are western dilettantes.”

Associated Press journalists in Bucha have counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes and interviewed Ukrainians who told of witnessing atrocities.

High-resolution satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed that many of the bodies had been lying in the open for weeks, during the time Russian forces were in the town.

Many of the dead seen by AP journalists appeared to have been shot at close range, and some had their hands bound or their flesh burned.

The chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court at The Hague opened an investigation a month ago into possible war crimes in Ukraine.