Putin defends the invasion, while evidence of occupation crimes multiplies

Russian President Vladimir Putin has defended the invasion of Ukraine and assured that the Russian armed forces will achieve the goals set in Donbas.

“This is what it wants. There is no doubt (the armed forces will achieve their goals). The goals are completely clear and noble,” he told EFE during a visit to the Vostochny spaceport in Russia with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Putin has insisted that what he calls a “special military operation” is necessary because the United States was using Ukraine to threaten Russia, Reuters quoted him as saying.

“The main goal is to help the people of Donbas, the people of Donbas who we have recognized and who have been forced to defend us, because the Kiev authorities, pushed by the West, have refused to implement the Minsk agreements aimed at resolving the peace. About the problems, “he said.

“They have started to turn Ukraine into an object of anti-Russian weapons, they have started cultivating the explosions of nationalism and neo-Nazism that have been there for a long time,” he said, welcoming the false theory that has been circulating in recent days. The “absolute majority” of Ukrainians in the Kremlin media are Nazis.

Putin noted that “the weeds of neo-Nazism were especially cultivated” and therefore Russia’s clash with these forces was inevitable and “a matter of time.”

Prominent commentators in the Russian media are increasingly spreading the view that a significant portion of Ukrainian society is under Nazi ideology (a country where, unlike Spain, extreme political parties failed to get 2.5% of the vote and were left without a seat. Place in the 2019 parliamentary elections). This has raised fears that this genocidal language will lead to more war crimes in Ukraine.

Evidence of crimes against civilians is multiplying

While Putin calls the war in Ukraine “noble,” there is growing evidence of atrocities committed by Russian troops against civilians. The New York Times published a special document outlining dozens of crimes in Bucha over the past week, following the testimony of survivors and an on-site investigation. Indiscriminate shooting by snipers, rape, the death penalty in basements and yards, carcasses burned in the parking lot, and mass graves are some of the crimes reported in the Times report.

This Tuesday, Ukrainian authorities found 10 more bodies in a mass grave in Bucha. The bodies were exhumed the same day as twenty members of the French gendarmerie went to Bucha to conduct a 15-day investigation into crimes committed by Russia, which the Kremlin denies and describes as a “gathering.”

According to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Irina Venediktova, who made a statement to the media from the place of exhumation, on March 3, after the beginning of the occupation by Russian troops, 250 dead were found in Bucha. Mass graves.

The BBC has published a testimony of a woman who Claims he was raped by Russian soldiers Who later killed her husband 70 kilometers west of Kiev.

“I was taken to a nearby house with a gun. I was ordered to take off my clothes, otherwise I would be killed. “Then I started raping her,” said Anna, a survivor, who said that when she returned home, her husband was found dead in the abdomen.

The British network ITV has collected several testimonies of indiscriminate executions in Bucha, while The Times has reported crimes in Borodyanka, another city where dozens of civilians were killed before being evacuated by Russian bombing.

According to the latest data collected by the EFE, in the Kiev region alone, which includes the country’s capital, the bodies of 1222 civilians killed by Russian soldiers were found.