Bodies lie on a street in Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, Ukraine. after Russian troops withdrew from the city (Ronaldo Schmidt/AFP)

Saturday’s Coverage: Zelenskiy — Russians Are Withdrawing from Near Kyiv

EA on Monocle 24: Will Higher Gasoline Prices Erode US Support for Ukraine?

UPDATE 1630 GMT:

Appearing on the US program Face The Nation, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has called for Vladimir Putin and his military commanders to be held accountable for the crimes and atrocities of Russian troops.

This is genocide, the elimination of the whole nation and the people.

We are the citizens of Ukraine, we have more than 100 nationalities. This is about the destruction and extermination of all these nationalities.

He said of the execution of civilians:/p>

When we find people with hands tied behind their back and decapitated, such things I don’t understand. I don’t comprehend the kids who were killed and tortured. It wasn’t enough just to kill, for those criminals? Maybe they wanted to take gold, or washing machines as they were killing, but they were also torturing them as they did this.

Despite the Russian war crimes, Zelenskiy said he will meet Putin for talks after a ceasefire.

It’s difficult to say how, after all what has been done, we can have any kind of negotiations with Russia. That’s on the personal level. But as a president, I have to do it.

There is no any other way but dialogue if we don’t want hundreds of thousands or millions to die [but] I can’t even have a meeting when the shelling is going on. So first, the ceasefire. Then we can have a meeting.

UPDATE 1325 GMT:

Human Rights Watch has documented “apparent war crimes” by Russian military forces against civilians in Ukraine.

HRW found “several cases of Russian military forces committing laws-of-war violations” in the areas of Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Kyiv.

These include a case of repeated rape; two cases of summary execution, one of six men, the other of one man; and other cases of unlawful violence and threats against civilians between February 27 and March 14, 2022. Soldiers were also implicated in looting civilian property, including food, clothing, and firewood.

One of the cases is in Bucha, where Russian forces are now suspected of executing hundreds of civilians before they withdrew from the city. On March 4, troops rounded up five men. They forced the five men to kneel on the side of the road, pulled their T-shirts over their heads, and shot one of them in the back of the head.

In the village of Staryi Bykiv, in Chernihiv region, the Russian forces rounded up and executed at least six men on February 27. The mother of one of the victims was nearby when her son and another man were apprehended, and saw the dead bodies of all six men.

On March 6, Russian soldiers in the village of Vorzel, northwest of Kyiv, threw a smoke grenade into a basement, then shot a woman and a 14-year-old child as they emerged from the basement where they were sheltering. The teenager died immediately, and the woman two days later.

A woman told HRW that a Russian soldier had repeatedly raped her in a school, where she and her family were sheltering, in the Kharkiv region on March 13. He beat her and cut her face, neck, and hair with a knife. The woman fled the next day to Kharkiv city, where she received medical treatment.

For the report, HRW interviewed 10 people, including witnesses, victims, and local residents of Russia-occupied territories, in person or by telephone.

UPDATE 1145 GMT:

Lithuania has stopped importing natural gas from Russia, President Gitanas Nauseda announced.

The country of 2.8 million people, bordering on Russia’s Kaliningrad, was once fully dependent on Russian gas, but it reduced depended with construction of a liquefied natural gas terminal in 2014.

Latvia said it and Estonia joined its fellow Baltic State in the cutoff.

Uldis Bariss, CEO of Conexus Baltic Grid – Latvia’s natural gas storage operator, said on Saturday:

If there were still any doubts about whether there may be any trust in deliveries from Russia, current events clearly show us that there is no more trust.

Since April 1st, Russian natural gas is no longer flowing to Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

UPDATE 1135 GMT:

Russia has again carried out strikes on Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine.

Ukraine Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko said several rockets hit the city, on the Dneiper River upstream from the Black Sea.

Russia has stepped up aerial assaults after failing to occupy Mykolaiv. An attack last Tuesday on the regional administration building killed at least 35 people.

UPDATE 1120 GMT:

Ukraine’s grain exports fell 80% in March because of the Russian invasion.

Shipments last month included 1.1 million tonnes of corn, 309,000 tonnes of wheat, and 118,000 tonnes of sunoil. There were some deliveries to Poland by rail, but movement via Black Sea ports was blocked because of Russian attacks.

Ukraine is the world’s fourth-largest grain exporter.

UPDATE 0905 GMT:

Russian forces have reportedly killed Lithuanian film director Mantas Kvedaravičius as he tried to leave besieged Mariupol in southern Ukraine.

Director Vitaly Mansky said Kvedaravičius was slain with a camera in his hands.

Kvedaravičius, who made the documentaries Barzakh and Mariupolis and the drama Parthenon, is the eighth journalist or filmmaker killed during the Russian invasion.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said, “We lost a creator well known in Lithuania and in the whole world, who until the very last moment, in spite of danger, worked in Russia-occupied Ukraine.”

UPDATE 0900 GMT:

Ukraine Presidential spokesman Sergey Nikiforov has spoken with the BBC about Russia’s mass execution of civilians in what “looks exactly like war crimes”.

Nikiforov said the destruction and killings in areas such as Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, are “really hard to describe”.

We found mass graves. We found people with their hands and with their legs tied up… and with shots, bullet holes, in the back of their head.

They were clearly civilians and they were executed.

We found half-burned bodies as if somebody tried to hide their crimes but they didn’t have enough time to do it properly.

UPDATE 0745 GMT:

Russian forces have fired missiles on a “critical infrastructure facilities” in Odesa, the city of 1 million people in southern Ukraine on the Black Sea.

Regional administration spokesperson Sergey Bratchuk said, “We hope there will be no casualties.”

Interior Ministry advisor Anton Herashchenko wrote, “Fires were reported in some areas. Some of the missiles were shot down by air defense.”

The Russian Defense Ministry said missile strikes destroyed an oil refinery and three fuel storage facilities.

ORIGINAL ENTRY: Russia’s forces carried out mass executions of civilians as they occupied and then withdrew from parts of the Kyiv region in Ukraine.

Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said on Saturday, “Irpin, Bucha, Gostomel and the whole Kyiv region — is liberated from the invader.”

But the announcement was accompanied by evidence — video, images, and witness accounts — that the Russian troops shot and killed hundreds of civilians in Bucha, northwest of Kyiv.

Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk said 280 residents were buried in a mass grave. Some of the corpses on the street were as young as 14 years old — many had white bandages on them “to show that they were unarmed”.

“All these people were shot, killed, in the back of the head,” Fedoruk said.

His statement was supported by video of bodies strewn across Bucha’s street, and graphic photos of some of the dead men, with head wounds and with hands bound.

Journalist Taras Berezovets went further with the report that the “Russian Army killed all men between 16 abd 60 who did not manage to escape”.

The evidence amplified video from March 12, which showed 67 civilians buried in a mass grave next to the local church two days earlier.

Killing Families

Halyna Tovkach, 55, spoke of the killing of her husband and of three family members — two young boys and their mother — with whom they were leaving Bucha on March 5.

The families were fleeing in two cars, carrying their possessions. They had not even reached the town limits when Russian Troops halted them and fired machine guns.

Margarita Chykmariov, 33, and her sons Matvey, 8, and Klim, 4, were killed immediately. Her husband Oleksandr, 42, survived but lost a leg.

Oleg Tovkach, 62, was slain. Helyna was shot in the right shoulder but was able to run away.

Oleg Tovkach’s body remained in the car for five days, with the Russians refusing to permit its removal.

The Tovkachs’ son Roman, who was outside Ukraine on business when the Russians invaded, tells The Guardian, “I don’t know where my father’s body is. I have to find him.”

He adds, “I hope this will be of interest to you. It is a war crime.”

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Executing A Village Leader and Her Family

In Motyzhyn, east of Kyiv, the incoming Ukrainian troops found the bodies of village leader Olha Sukhenko and her family. All had been shot.

Ukrainian officials in liberated areas such as Bucha and Brovary, 12 miles east of Kyiv, said the Russians heavily mined the ground as they departed, even placed the explosives next to corpses.

The emergencies service said more than 1,500 explosives were found in one day in the village of Dmytrivka, west of the capital.

Chernihiv regional governor Viacheslav Chaus also spoke of Russians mining as they retreated from the area 100 miles to the north of the capital, “There are a lot of mines. [The villages] are strewn with them.”

Ukraine’s Attorney General is also compiling a dossier of claims that the Russian forces used children as human shields, to avoid fire as they withdrew.

Lyudmila Denisova, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, said, “Cases of using children as cover are recorded in the Sumy, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhia oblasts [provinces].”

Coaches of children were allegedly placed in front of tanks in the village of Novyi Bykiv, near Chernihiv.

Defense Ministry spokesman Col. Oleksandr Motuzyanyk explained:

Enemies have been using Ukrainian children as a living shield when moving their convoys, moving their vehicles.

Russian soldiers have used Ukrainian children as hostages, putting them on their trucks. They’re doing it to protect their vehicles when moving.

Zelenskiy: Russia Regrouping to Attack East and South

In his late-night video address to the nation, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy conformed the regained control of the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions.

However, he said Ukrainians cannot “cherish empty hopes” that the Russians would just leave, as Moscow now hopes to seize territory in the east and south of the country.

We are strengthening our defences in the eastern direction and in Donbas… What is the goal of Russian troops? They want to capture both the Donbas and the south of Ukraine.

The President said peace would only come if Ukrainians work “in hard battles, and in parallel, in negotiations”.

Asserting that the “global security architecture has failed”, Zelenskiy again asked other countries for more military aid, as Ukraine had “not yet received enough modern western anti-missile systems”.

Every Russian missile that hits our cities, and every bomb dropped on our people, on our children, only adds black paint to the history that will describe everyone on whom the decision depended.

Ukraine: Russia Verbally Agreed to Our Proposals

Ukraine’s lead negotiator says Russia has “verbally” agreed to almost all of Kyiv’s proposals.

David Arakhamia said on TV, “The Russian Federation has given an official answer to all positions, which is that they accept [our] position, except for the issue of Crimea,” the Ukrainian peninsula occupied by Russian forces in 2014.

Arakhamia said there was not yet “official confirmation in writing” of the agreement.

Ukraine has proposed a non-aligned status with a security guarantee to Kyiv — similar to NATO’s Article 5 for collective defense against attack — from countries such as the US, UK, France, and Turkey.

Russia will drop any objection to Ukraine’s membership of the European Union. There will be a 15-year consultation period over the status of Crimea.

Arakhamia said Russia had agreed in talks that a referendum on the neutral status of Ukraine “will be the only way out of this situation”.

If Ukrainians voted against neutral status, Arakhamia said that “we will either return to a state of war, perhaps, or return to new negotiations”.

Russia’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky responded, “The draft agreement is not ready for submission to a meeting at the top. I repeat again and again: Russia’s position on Crimea and Donbas remains UNCHANGED.”

He added that peace talks have not progressed enough for meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as Turkey offers to host the leaders.