Table of Contents
What has happened?
- President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russian troops of committing “the most terrible war crimes” since World War II in an address to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday,
- As outrage and revulsion swept through Western capitals at what appeared to be incontrovertible evidence of grisly civilian massacres in Ukrainian areas vacated recently by Russian forces.
The massacre
- Bucha is a town located about 25 km to the northwest of the capital, which had an estimated population of around 36,000 before the invasion began.
- More than 300 bodies have been found in the town that Zelenskyy visited on Monday, some with their hands bound, flesh burned, and shot in the back of the head.
- Until Tuesday afternoon, officials had counted bodies of at least 410 civilians in towns around Kyiv, where Russian and Ukrainian forces battled from around February 27 until the beginning of April when, as the invaders withdrew, evidence of likely war crimes began to emerge.
- Satellite images from mid-March that are now available show streets strewn with corpses, and many of the bodies seen by journalists in the past couple of days appear to have lain in the open for weeks.
- Corpses have been found in a shallow mass grave in a church compound, and officials have said five bodies with their hands tied lay in the basement of a children’s sanatorium that was used by the occupiers as a “torture chamber” for civilians.
Similar to WWII
- The discoveries have drawn comparisons with the killings of civilians in this area during World War II.
- Between the First Battle of Kyiv (part of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union that began in June 1941) and the Second Battle of Kyiv (November-December 1943) when the Red Army started to push back the Germans from Ukraine,
- The area around the Ukrainian capital, including Bucha, saw the “Holocaust by bullets” during which an estimated 5 million people, mostly Jews, were shot dead at close range.
- Residents told Human Rights Watch that Russian soldiers went from door to door, questioning people and looting their possessions.
- Russian armed vehicles allegedly fired arbitrarily into buildings.
Genocide or war crimes?
- Both expressions have been used freely in outraged Ukrainian and Western descriptions of the atrocities in Bucha.
- Whether these incidents fit those definitions is important because of the international community’s obligation to respond to them.
- Ukraine and the West have accused Russia of war crimes even earlier, alleging that it targeted civilians in the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol and a theatre that announced it was sheltering children.
- War crimes are defined as “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, agreements signed after World War II that laid down international humanitarian laws during war time.
- Deliberately targeting civilians amounts to a war crime.
- The crime of genocide, as defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention of December 1948,
- Includes acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
- Genocide is seen as the gravest and most serious of all crimes against humanity.
reactions
- All of Ukraine’s Western allies, the EU Council, NATO and UN Secretary General, have strongly condemned the massacre in Bucha.
- Amid calls for more, stronger sanctions against Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden have expelled dozens of Russian diplomats, and Swedish prosecutors have opened a preliminary investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine.
- Russia has denied all accusations, the Kremlin saying that the claims coming out of Bucha were a “well directed but tragic show”, and a “monstrous forgery” to denigrate the Russian army.
- It has called the diplomatic expulsions “short-sighted”, and said “reciprocal steps” would follow.
Q) The Universal declaration of human rights is applicable to?
- Every individual, regardless of religion, race, gender
- The citizens of UN member countries
- Countries who signed the declaration
- None of the above
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