The mayor of Bucha has said that he believes that over 300 people were massacred in the small city by Russian occupying troops.
The evidence is mounting that the Russian army, which invaded Ukraine six weeks ago and occupied the city, carried our indiscriminate killings of civilians and buried many of them in mass graves.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that he believes what has happened in Bucha as being a deliberate 'genocide' of the Ukrainian people.
He said in his daily press statement:
"To talk about the discoveries in Bucha and our other cities from where the occupiers were expelled. Hundreds of people killed, tortured, executed civilians. Bodies on the streets. Booby-trapped area. Even the bodies of the dead are booby-trapped. Concentrated evil has visited our land. The killers, executioners, rapists, marauders who call themselves an army - and who deserve only death after what they've done."
Satellite imagery from the town appears to show a 45-foot-long mass grave next to a church in the city that formerly housed around 36,000 people prior to the invasion.
The Russian state has denied any wrongdoing, saying that the deaths were the result of 'Ukrainian extremists'.
Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said of the scenes emerging from Bucha:
"Serious and disturbing questions about possible war crimes, grave breaches of international humanitarian law and serious violations of international human rights law [must be investigated]".
Bucha was one of the main cities sitting in the path between the Russian northern invasion from Belarus and the capital Kyiv. While the town was occupied in the first few days, the Russians failed dramatically in their attempt to encircle and seize the Ukrainian capital, withdrawing five weeks after they invaded, in what they claim is a move that will allow Russian forces to focus on the east of the country, notably the Donbass region.
Worryingly, it is said that in the city of Mariupol, which has been under siege for weeks and has been cut off almost entirely from the rest of Ukraine, there are scenes much worse than in Bucha.
Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has said that Bucha is just 'the tip of the iceberg' and that Mariupol is 'much worse'. He told reporters:
"The horrors that we've seen in Bucha are just the tip of the iceberg of all the crimes that have been committed by Russian Army in the territory of Ukraine so far. And I can tell you without exaggeration and with great sorrow that the situation in Mariupol is much worse compared to what we've seen in Bucha and other cities, towns and villages nearby Kyiv."
[Based on reporting by: Sky news]
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