In fiery speech, Ukraine’s Zelensky implores U.N. Security Council to hold Russia to account

INA- SOURCES

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in an impassioned address to the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday, likened perceived Russian atrocities in his homeland to Nazi war crimes, calling for Nuremberg-style tribunals to hold Moscow accountable.
“They shot and killed women outside their houses. They killed entire families, adults and children, and they tried to burn the bodies,” Zelensky said in a video appearance before the Security Council, a day after an emotional visit to the ravaged town of Bucha, outside the capital, Kyiv.
 
“They cut off limbs, slashed throats, raped women in front of their children,” the Ukrainian leader said in his most forceful excoriation to date of the Russian invasion.
 
In a perhaps risky strategy of sharply criticizing the body from which he is seeking help, Zelensky issued a stark challenge to world institutions such as the United Nations to make sweeping changes to the global security architecture, asking sardonically at one point: “Are you ready to close the U.N.?”
 
“It is obvious that the key institutions of the world … simply cannot work effectively,” said the 44-year-old president, who has won worldwide accolades for presiding over his compatriots’ fierce and sustained resistance to the Russian attempt to subjugate Ukraine.

Following a Russian pullback from areas around the Ukrainian capital, horrific images and footage have emerged in recent days from the once-placid Kyiv suburbs and other northern areas — bodies lining the streets, corpses with bound hands, the forlorn figure of a man shot dead, sprawled beside his bicycle. At least 410 bodies have been found, including many bearing signs of torture, Ukrainian officials say.

The small town of Borodyanka, about 15 miles northwest of Bucha, was reduced to ruins. Video showed multistory buildings along the main thoroughfare ravaged and burned out by airstrikes after Russian forces withdrew. Several apartment complexes had collapsed. Officials have said they fear hundreds of people in the town could be dead in the rubble.

More such harrowing scenes are likely to emerge, Zelensky said, as Ukrainian forces reassert control in northern areas previously under control of Russian troops, who are now redeploying and refitting for what Ukrainian and Western officials believe is a redoubled offensive in the country’s south and east.
“The world has yet to see what they have done in other occupied cities and regions of our country,” Zelensky said.

The alleged atrocities have set off a new wave of calls for a halt to the fighting and for broad new sanctions against Russia, including a proposal by the European Union’s executive arm for a ban on imports of Russian coal.

“It is more urgent by the day to silence the guns,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council before Zelensky spoke, citing not only the devastation in Ukraine, but a rapidly developing food crisis in parts of the world as a result of the war.

Nearly six weeks into the war, Ukrainian and Western defense officials warned of a reinvigorated Russian assault in the country’s eastern industrial heartland and elsewhere.
 
“This is a crucial phase of the war,” NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels in advance of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization ministerial meeting beginning Wednesday. U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is scheduled to attend.
 
Despite a reprieve for Kyiv and surrounding areas, Ukraine’s military said Russian forces, largely repelled in the country’s north, were readying a fresh offensive in the eastern Donbas region and in southern Ukraine.
 
Underscoring the peril faced by humanitarian workers trying to ease desperate hardships in besieged areas, a senior Ukrainian official said a Red Cross team detained near the strategic southern port of Mariupol had been released. But tens of thousands of residents remained in danger in the encircled city.
 
The deputy Ukrainian prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said more than 3,800 people — including more than 2,200 in private vehicles from Mariupol and Berdyansk — were evacuated through specially designated humanitarian evacuation corridors on Tuesday.
 
A convoy of seven buses and more than 40 private cars sent to evacuate civilians from Mariupol, however, was forced to return after encountering a blockade about 12 miles outside the city. Previous efforts have often been derailed by fighting and Russian shelling.