“In the 21st century, such attacks against the civilian population are unthinkable and abhorrent,” said Jan Lipavsky, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic, which holds the rotating EU presidency. “We must not overlook it. We support the punishment of all war criminals,” he added in a message on Twitter. “I call for the speedy establishment of a special international court to prosecute the crime of aggression.” The appeal follows the discovery by Ukrainian authorities of around 450 graves outside the former Russian-held town of Izium, with most of the exhumed bodies showing signs of torture. “Among the bodies exhumed today, 99 percent showed signs of violent death,” Oleg Sinegubov, head of the Kharkiv regional administration, said on social media. “There are several corpses with their hands tied behind their backs and one person is buried with a rope around their neck,” he added. “Russia leaves only death and suffering. Murderers. Torturers,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Some of the remains exhumed include children and people who were likely tortured before they died, he added. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Friday that the graves likely provided more evidence that Russia is committing war crimes in its pro-Western neighbour. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, joined the condemnation, calling what happened in Izium an atrocity. “I condemn in the strongest terms the atrocities committed in Izyum, Ukraine under Russian occupation,” Macron tweeted. The Commissioner for Human Rights of the Ukrainian parliament, Dmytro Lubinets, said that “probably more than 1,000 Ukrainian citizens were tortured and killed in the liberated territories of the Kharkiv region.” Ukraine’s national police chief, Igor Klymenko, said they had found several torture chambers in the town of Balakliya and elsewhere in Kharkiv since the Russians were driven out. The UN in Geneva said it hoped to send a team to determine the circumstances of the death. The discoveries came just over five months after the Russian army, driven out of the region of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, left behind hundreds of civilian bodies, many bearing the marks of torture and summary executions. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The EU is “deeply shocked” by the discovery by Ukrainian officials of mass graves in the recaptured city of Izium, the bloc’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Friday. “This inhumane behavior by Russian forces, in complete disregard of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions, must stop immediately,” he said. On Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she wanted Russian President Vladimir Putin to face the international criminal court for war crimes in Ukraine. In Washington, US President Joe Biden warned his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin against using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons after heavy losses in his war in Ukraine. “Do not. Don’t do it. Don’t do it,” Biden said, in an excerpt from an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes that aired Friday night. Biden was responding to an interviewer’s question about whether Putin, whose military has suffered heavy losses in a Ukrainian counteroffensive this month, would resort to chemical or tactical nuclear weapons. “You would change the face of war unlike anything since World War II,” Biden said. “They will become more pariahs in the world, more than ever,” the American leader added. Ukrainian forces have recaptured thousands of square kilometers in recent weeks thanks to a counteroffensive in the northeast and are now threatening enemy positions in the south. The Russians “are angry because our army is pushing them back in its counterattack,” said Svitlana Spuk, a 42-year-old worker in Kryvyi Rih, a southern city and Zelensky’s home town, which was flooded after a dam. destroyed by Russian missiles. Synegoubov said an 11-year-old girl was killed by rockets in the area. Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of Donestk in eastern Ukraine, which has been partially controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014, said on social media that Ukrainian firefighters were battling the blaze there and that the shelling had led to cuts in drinking water. “The occupiers are deliberately targeting infrastructure in the area to try to cause as much damage as possible, mainly to the civilian population,” he said. The Russian military denies targeting urban infrastructure or residential areas. At its daily briefing in Moscow, the Kremlin said it had carried out “high precision” strikes against Ukrainian positions in the Mykolaiv and Kharkiv regions.
