Ukraine says 410 bodies found from reclaimed areas and other top points of war
Russia and Ukraine are set to resume their peace talks via video conference on Monday. Interfax reported the Kremlin as saying that Russia would achieve all of its aims of the “special military operation” in Ukraine, and hoped that the two sides could finally sign some sort of peace deal.
Russia’s war on Ukraine took a grave turn on Sunday amid reports of mass civilian killings being reported from the east European nation.
Ukraine said it had found 410 civilian bodies from areas it recently retook from the Russian army in the wider Kyiv region. A day ago, bodies of at least 20 people in civilian robes were found lying in a single street in Bucha - northwest of Ukrainian capital Kyiv. The United States and its Western allies strongly condemned the reports even as Russia refuted the allegations.
Speaking to US television network CBS for its ‘Face the Nation’ show, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “This is genocide. The elimination of the whole nation and the people." The President, who was speaking via a translator, said Ukrainians did not want to be “subdued to the policy of (the) Russian Federation… This is the reason we are being destroyed and exterminated.”
Russia and Ukraine are set to resume their peace talks via video conference on Monday. Interfax reported the Kremlin as saying that Russia would achieve all of its aims of the “special military operation” in Ukraine, and hoped that the two sides could finally sign some sort of peace deal.
Here’s some more developments that unfolded on day 39 of the Ukraine war:
1. A mass grave with bodies of at least 57 people was found in Bucha, a day after the discovery of alleged civilian executions in the same town. According to an AFP report, there was a slit trench in the town where all the bodies were laid and the grave was located behind a church at the town centre.
2. Kyiv region’s prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova said, "410 bodies of dead civilians were evacuated out of the liberated territories of the Kyiv region. Forensic experts have already examined 140".
3. US secretary of state Antony Blinken said the images of the grave and the corpses of supposed civilians were a “punch to the gut”, while NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg termed the killings as “horrific” and “unacceptable”. The UK, Italy, France, Germany and the European Union (EU) called for those responsible in the killings to be brought to justice at the international tribunal in The Hague.
4. Russia denied the allegations of killing civilians in Ukraine, with the defence ministry saying that the photographs were a complete “provocation”. Moscow further said its forces had left Bucha on March 30. Russian forces had left several nearby regions of Kyiv over the last few days following its promise to drastically scale back operations from the Ukrainian capital and Chernihiv at Moscow's face-to-face talks with Kyiv negotiators in Turkey on Tuesday (March 29).
5. Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania said they were no longer importing Russian oil and gas. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda on Saturday said that if the country - which had 2.3 million population, can do it, “the rest of Europe can do it too”.
6. Russian missiles hit a “critical infrastructure”, most likely a fuel depot, near Ukraine's southern port city of Odesa earlier in the day. There was no report of any death, officials in the city said
