Last week, Russian forces withdrew from the war-torn city of Izium as Ukrainian soldiers advanced, reclaiming large swaths of territory in Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy looked on Wednesday as the national anthem was sung and the Ukrainian flag was raised in front of the burned-out city hall, until four days ago, Russia’s main bastion and logistics hub in the region.
“They only destroyed, only seized, only deported,” he said. “They left devastated villages, and in some of them, there is not a single surviving house.” After the anthem, a gaping hole and piles of rubble stood where a building had buckled and crumbled.
“The view is very shocking, but it is not shocking for me,” Zelensky, 44, told journalists, reported the New York Post. “Because we began to see the same pictures from Bucha, from the first de-occupied territories … the same destroyed buildings killed people.”
Izium was primarily destroyed after nearly six months of Russian occupation, with apartment buildings blackened by fire and pockmarked by artillery strikes.
Bucha is a small city on the border of Kyiv, from which Russian forces retreated in March. Following the incident, Ukrainian authorities discovered hundreds of civilians’ bodies dumped in streets, yards, and mass graves. Many of them bore signs of torture, Military Times reported.
Prosecutors said they had discovered six bodies with torture traces in recently retaken Kharkiv region villages. Oleksandr Filchakov, the head of the Kharkiv prosecutor’s office, said bodies were found in Hrakove and Zaliznyche, villages about 60 kilometers south-east of Kharkiv.
“We have a terrible picture of what the occupiers did. … Such cities as Balakliia, Izium, are standing in the same row as Bucha, Borodyanka, Irpin,” said Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin.
Local officials in other areas have made similar claims about their cities and villages, previously held by Russia, but their information could not be verified immediately. Some claims about the atrocities have even been silenced in those war-torn regions, their accusations offending the prevailing narrative.
The Ukrainians have yet to provide proof of possible brutalities on the scale labeled in Bucha, where the number and conditions of civilian fatalities prompted international calls for Russian officials to face war crimes charges.
According to Zelenskyy’s spokesman on Facebook, a passenger car collided with the president’s vehicle during a motorcade in Kyiv early Thursday. With Russian tanks and vehicles strewn along a road, spokesman Sergii Nikiforov claimed the other vehicle’s driver received first aid from Zelenskyy’s medical team and was taken by ambulance.
Nikiforov also reported medics examined the president, who had no serious injuries in the accident. He did not specify the nature of Zelenskyy’s injuries.
