NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880/AP) -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the U.N. Security Council in Manhattan for the first time Tuesday, accusing the Russian military of war crimes and calling for a Nuremberg-like tribunal to investigate and prosecute what he said were a long list of abuses in his country. The head of NATO, meanwhile, warned that Russia is regrouping its forces in order to deploy them to eastern and southern Ukraine for a “crucial phase of the war," as the European Union proposed new sanctions targeting Russia's lucrative energy industry.
TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 2022
5:50 p.m. - Putin 'should be stopped by force': Ukrainian parliament member
Ukrainian parliament member Yevheniya Kravhuck told CNN on Tuesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin will need to be "stopped by force."
"The only way is to win the battlefield, because, you know, no phone calls to Putin, no statements, no tweets, no Facebook posts cannot stop him," she told host Jake Tapper. "He should be stopped by force."
Kravhuck cited the devastation in Bucha and Mariupol, where she said officials can't even get into account for civilian casualties.
"We can't even get there. You showed these numbers that United Nations say, they killed civilians, but it's much, much more. Only in Mariupol, local consulate say it's more than 5,000 of civilians dead, and we can't get there to count, to find out what's going on there," she said.
5:15 p.m. - France offers to send war crime forensics team into Ukraine
France offered to send in a forensics team to Ukraine on Tuesday to collect evidence for an alleged war crimes probe by Russian forces.
French President Emmanuel Macron made the suggestion to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offering two magistrates and 10 police officers to help with the probe, according to a readout of their phone conversation.
Macron also said France would give $534,000 to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to aid in their investigation.
4:30 p.m. - New sanctions to be levied on Russia following 'war crime' evidence, ban new investments
The United States and western allies plan to pile additional sanctions on Russia on Wednesday after the emergence of troubling new evidence of war crimes in Ukraine, according to the White House. The new penalties will include a ban on all new investment in Russia.
Among the other measures being taken against Russia are greater sanctions on its financial institutions and state-owned enterprises, and sanctions on government officials and their family members, according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
“The goal is to force them to make a choice,” she said. “The biggest part of our objective here is to deplete the resources that Putin has to continue his war against Ukraine.”
Separately, the Treasury Department moved Tuesday to block any Russian government debt payments with U.S. dollars from accounts at U.S. financial institutions, making it harder for Russia to meet its financial obligations.
1:45 p.m. - Ukraine sees spike in cyberattacks targeting country
Ukraine’s top cybersecurity official said cyberattacks against his country have increased in the last two weeks and there’s evidence that Russian military hackers that tried to break into Ukrainian state agencies also attempted to hack Latvian officials’ email accounts.
Victor Zhora told reporters Tuesday that a major Ukrainian telecommunications provider, Ukrtelecom, suffered an attack on March 28, but was able to restore most of the affected service within a day.
Kirill Goncharuk, Ukrtelecom’s chief information officer, said hackers used compromised credentials of an employee in Russian-occupied territory occupied to break in to his company’s network. He said the employee was okay but couldn’t disclose additional details for safety concerns.
Zhora said hackers had also recently gained access to the emails of staff at Ukraine’s foreign ministry. He said despite the increased hacking attempts in recent days, he’s not seen any successful “complicated attacks” on any Ukrainian critical infrastructure targets.
11:30 a.m. - In UN address, Zelenskyy accuses Russian military of war crimes, calls for Nuremberg-like tribunal
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the U.N. Security Council for the first time via video on Tuesday morning, accusing Russian troops of the worst atrocities since World War II and saying they are no different from other terrorists like the Islamic State extremist group.
Over the course of about 15 minutes, Zelenskyy accused Russia of war crimes and of using its Security Council veto power to undermine global security during its invasion of Ukraine.
“We are dealing with a state that is turning their veto into the U.N. Security Council into the right to die,” he said through a translator. “This undermines the whole global architecture of global security. It allows them to go unpunished.”
The president listed a multitude of alleged abuses by Russian forces, describing in graphic detail what happened to civilians, including rape, mutilation and indiscriminate killing.
“They died there in suffering,” Zelenskyy said.
He showed the U.N.’s most powerful body brief video footage of bloody corpses that ended with the words “Stop Russian Aggression.”
“This is no different from other terrorists,” he said, comparing Russia to ISIS. “And here it is done by a member of the United Nations Security Council.”
Zelenskyy said the Russians were leaving his country “in ruins and filled with mass graves” while exporting propaganda and “hate at the state level.” He said the war has implications abroad, including a global food crisis as grain exports are imperiled.
The president said it was the responsibility of the U.N. as the “key institution of the world” to prevent situations like the one currently unfolding in Ukraine.
“Where are those guarantees that the United Nations needs to guarantee?” he said.
He pointed out the first article of the U.N. Charter, which is to “maintain international peace and security.”
Zelenskyy pushed for a full war crimes investigation in Ukraine on the heels of horrific images of dead civilians out of Bucha and other areas recently occupied by Russian forces. He wants the U.N. to create a tribunal similar to Nuremberg after World War II.
“Accountability must be inevitable,” he said.
The president said the reported atrocities in Bucha are just the tip of the iceberg and that there are abuses in other areas.
“Now the world can see what the Russian military did in Bucha while keeping the city under their occupation,” he said. “But the world has yet to see what they have done in other occupied cities and regions of our country.”
He said Russian forces are looting victims and that starvation is widespread in besieged cities, where civilians are shot dead in the streets and blown up while hiding in shelters.
“In our country, in Ukraine, the most terrible war crimes of all time, that we’ve seen since the end of World War II, are being committed,” he said. “Russian troops are deliberately destroying Ukrainian cities to ashes with artillery and airstrikes.”
He called Moscow’s response to the accusations predictable, saying, “They will blame everyone just to justify their own actions. They will say that there are various versions and that it is impossible to establish which of those versions is true.”
10:30 a.m. - Zelenskyy to address UN Security Council in NYC
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will address the U.N.’s most powerful body, the Security Council, virtually at U.N. headquarters in Manhattan.
The United Kingdom, which holds the council presidency this month, announced late Monday that Zelenskyy would speak at the open meeting already scheduled for Tuesday to discuss the situation in Ukraine.
The meeting began at 10:30 a.m. It will be Zelenskyy’s latest address to world leaders; he’s also addressed lawmakers in many countries, including the U.S. Congress and U.K. Parliament.
Zelenskyy’s address is expected to focus on what appear to be deliberate killings of civilians in Ukraine by Russian troops.
Ukrainian officials said the bodies of at least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv that were recaptured from Russian forces and that a “torture chamber” was discovered in the town called Bucha, from which some of the grimmest details have emerged.
Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, accused Ukraine and the West on Monday of “a false flag attempt” to blame Russian troops for atrocities in Bucha that he charged were committed by Ukrainian nationalists. He said Russia would present further "factual evidence” to the Security Council on Tuesday.
The Security Council remains paralyzed on taking any action on Ukraine because Russia as one of its five permanent members has veto power.
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield announced Monday that the U.S. will soon introduce a General Assembly resolution that would suspend Russia from the U.N.’s premiere human rights body, the 57-nation Human Rights Council.
Any resolution to suspend Russia’s membership rights would require support from two-thirds of member countries that vote “yes” or “no.” Thomas-Greenfield told NPR late Monday that the U.S. plans to seek a vote “as soon as possible this week, and possibly as early as Thursday.”
9 a.m. - NATO secretary general expects more atrocities: ‘We haven’t seen everything’
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says he expects more atrocities to come to light in Ukraine as Russian troops continue to retreat from areas around Kyiv.
Stoltenberg said Tuesday that “we haven’t seen everything that has taken place because Russia still controls most of these territories” around the capital. “But when and if they withdraw their troops and Ukrainian troops take over, I’m afraid they will see more mass graves, more atrocities and more examples of of war crimes.”
Stoltenberg rejected Russian assertions that the atrocities were staged.
He said that “these atrocities have taken place during a period in which Russia controlled these areas. So they are responsible. Second, we have information from many different sources.”
Stoltenberg also said Russia is regrouping its troops away from Kyiv only to mass them in the east and south of Ukraine in the coming weeks “for a crucial phase of the war.”
Stoltenberg said that “Moscow is not giving up its ambitions in Ukraine” after withdrawing troops from region around the capital “to regroup, arm and resupply and to shift the focus to the East.”
He said that “we expect a further push in the eastern and southern Ukraine to try to take the entire Donbas and to create a land bridge” to the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.
8 a.m. - Kremlin responds after EU countries expel dozens of Russian diplomats
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says the expulsions of Russian diplomats by European countries will prompt a response from Moscow and will complicate international relations.
Germany, France, Italy and Spain are among the countries which have expelled diplomats since Monday.
Peskov said that “we view negatively, we view with regret this narrowing of possibilities for diplomatic communication, diplomatic work in such difficult conditions, in unprecedent crisis conditions.”
He added that “it is short-sighted and a step which firstly will complicate our communication, which is required in order to seek reconciliation. And secondly it will inevitably lead to reciprocal steps.”
7 a.m. - More than 11 million have fled Ukraine since invasion began: UN
The U.N. migration agency now estimates that more than 11 million people have fled their homes in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion.
The International Organization for Migration, in its first such full assessment in three weeks, reported Tuesday that more than 7.1 million had been displaced within Ukraine as of April 1. That comes on top of the figure of more than 4 million who have fled abroad, reported by the U.N. refugee agency.
IOM said more than 2.9 million others are actively considering “leaving their place of habitual residence due to war.”
Ukraine had a pre-war population of 44 million.
Related
Related
Related
