VOLODYMYR Zelenskyy has compared Russia to Daesh in an address to the UN Security Council after Kremlin troops massacred civilians in a city near Kyiv.
The Ukrainian President said he had visited the “recently liberated” city of Bucha – where invading Russian forces are accused of killing civilians en mass – and he said there was “not a single crime that they (Russian forces) would not commit”.
Zelenskyy said the Russian troops had killed entire families and tried to burn their bodies, and that people were shot in the street or thrown into wells.
A Ukrainian serviceman checks the dead body of a civilian for booby traps in the formerly Russian-occupied Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Ukraine, Saturday, April 2, 2022 - AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda
Evidence from the city analysed by the BBC contradicts Russia’s claim footage of bodies lying in the city’s streets was “staged”.
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Women were raped and killed in front of their children, he said, while some people had their tongues “pulled out only because the aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear from them”.
Zelenskyy added: “This is no different from other terrorists such as Daesh who occupy some territories, and here it is done by a member of the United Nations Security Council.
“They support hatred at the level of the state and seek to export it to other countries through their system of propaganda and political corruption.”
Some 280 people were buried in mass graves, the city's mayor Anatoly Fedoruk said on Saturday.
Zelenskyy said the Russian military was perpetrating the "most terrible war crimes" since the end of the Second World War.
“Russian troops are deliberately destroying Ukrainian cities to ashes with artillery and air strikes, they are deliberately blocking cities, creating mass starvation," he told the UN.
“They deliberately shoot columns of civilians on the road trying to escape from the hostilities.
“They even deliberately blow up shelters where civilians hide from air strikes. They are deliberately creating conditions in the temporarily occupied territories so that as many civilians as possible are killed there."
The UN itself came in for criticism, with the Ukrainian President asking: “Although there is a Security Council and so where is the peace?”
He added: "It is obvious that the key institution of the world which must ensure the coercion of any aggressor to peace simply cannot work effectively.”
Britain’s UN ambassador Dame Barbara Woodward paid tribute to the Ukrainian President following his address.
Dame Barbara, who was sitting as President of the Security Council but speaking in her national capacity, said: “May I express appreciation to the president for his leadership in wartime and for the extraordinary fortitude and bravery of the Ukrainian people under this unprovoked and illegal invasion.”
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