UN chief António Guterres on Tuesday added his voice to the growing international calls for a war crimes investigation into the killing of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.
The Secretary-General’s comments came after shocking images from Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv showed hundreds of dead people, some with bullet wounds and their hands tied behind their backs and others burned or in mass graves, in areas previously under the control of Russian troops.
Mr. Guterres, who was addressing the UN Security Council, said that an independent probe was needed to guarantee effective accountability.
He described the Ukraine crisis, which was prompted by Russia’s “fully-fledged invasion” of its neighbour, as “one of the greatest challenges ever to the international order and the global peace architecture, founded on the United Nations Charter”.
To date, the Russian offensive has displaced more than 10 million people in just one month, the fastest forced population movement since the Second World War, Mr. Guterres said.
Of that number, more than 4.2 million have fled Ukraine’s borders, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, amid ongoing shelling and use of indiscriminate weapons that have seen 86 health and medical facilities attacked from 24 February to 2 April, the World Health Organization said.
Given the urgency of the situation, the UN chief explained that he had tasked the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths, to travel to Russia and Ukraine to press for an urgent humanitarian ceasefire.
In Geneva, where UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet has condemned the events at Bucha and spoken of possible war crimes, her Office explained that the episode marked a new low in the war, with victims’ bodies desecrated in death.
“What we have seen emerging in Bucha and other areas, clearly points to a very disturbing development…all the signs are that the victims were directly targeted and directly killed,” said Liz Throssell, spokesperson for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
Before the events in Bucha came to light, the UN rights office had already described indiscriminate shelling and bombardment as likely war crimes.
“You could argue there was a military context for example to a building being hit (but) it’s hard to see what was the military context of an individual lying in the street with a bullet to the head, or having their body burned,” Ms. Throssell told journalists.