Ukraine said Sunday it had found more than 1,200 bodies in the Kyiv region, the scene of atrocities allegedly committed by Russian troops, as residents in the country’s east braced—or fled—ahead of an expected massive offensive.
Heavy bombardments hammered Ukraine through the weekend, adding to mounting casualties six weeks into Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.
Shelling claimed two lives in northeast Kharkiv on Sunday morning, regional governor Oleg Synegubov said, the day after 10 civilians, including a child, died in bombings southeast of the city.
“The Russian army continues to wage war on civilians due to a lack of victories at the front,” Synegubov said on Telegram.
In Dnipro, an industrial city of around a million inhabitants, a rain of Russian missiles nearly destroyed the local airport, causing an uncertain number of casualties, local authorities said.
An AFP reporter saw black smoke in the sky above the facility, but a plane also took off later on Sunday, suggesting its runway was still functioning.
President Volodymyr Zelensky again condemned atrocities against civilians, and, after speaking with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said they had agreed “that all perpetrators of war crimes must be identified and punished.”
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said the country was examining the alleged culpability of 500 leading Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, for thousands of war crimes.
And White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan pledged the US would “work with the international community to make sure there’s accountability” for what he called “mass atrocities.”
At the Vatican, Pope Francis called for an Easter ceasefire to pave the way for peace, denouncing a war where “defenceless civilians” suffered “heinous massacres and atrocious cruelty.”
In his nightly address, Zelensky said Russian troops were about to launch “even larger operations” in the east of Ukraine.
“We are preparing for their actions. We will respond,” he said.
Residents have been fleeing in their thousands, but Lugansk governor Sergiy Gaiday said many were afraid to leave after a missile strike on a railway station in the city of Kramatorsk on Friday killed 57 people, according to a revised tally issued by local authorities.
“We evacuated 2,700-2,500 people per day, but now there are fewer and fewer,” Gaiday said, adding he was “sure that 20-25 percent” of the region’s population was still there.
“Sometimes we just beg [them] to come out of hiding because we know what comes next,” he said, adding Russian forces would “destroy everything in their path.”
Almost 50 wounded and elderly patients were transported from the east in a hospital train by medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) over the weekend, the first such evacuation since the attack on the Kramatorsk station.
Electrician Evhen Perepelytsia was one of those evacuated after he lost his leg, and almost his life, to shelling in his hometown of Hirske in Lugansk.
“We hope that the worst is over—that after what I’ve been through, it will be better,” said 30-year-old after the train arrived in the western city of Lviv.
Russia’s defense ministry has denied carrying out the Kramatorsk attack.
It said Kyiv and its western allies were continuing to stage “monstrous and merciless” provocations and murdering civilians in the self-proclaimed Lugansk People’s Republic, one of two pro-Russian separatist statelets in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas.