KYIV — The
US and UK announced new sanctions against
Russia Wednesday after Ukraine said hundreds of civilians were found dead
around its capital, as Kyiv warned residents in the east of the country to get
out “now” ahead of a feared assault.
اضافة اعلان
The White House unveiled measures targeting Russia’s
top public and private banks and two daughters of
President Vladimir Putin,
while Britain sanctioned two banks — and vowed to eliminate all Russian oil and
gas imports by year-end.
Their actions followed an international outcry after
Ukraine said its forces found hundreds of civilians dead around the capital
Kyiv, including the town of Bucha, after Russian troops withdrew.
In a video address to the UN Security Council on
Tuesday,
Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky showed harrowing images of corpses
— including of children — that he said were victims of Russian atrocities.
The Kremlin denies responsibility and on Wednesday,
Putin accused Ukrainian authorities of being behind “crude and cynical
provocations” in Bucha, in a call with Hungary’s prime minister, the Kremlin
said.
The Russian withdrawal from areas around
Kyiv and
the north is part of a shift in focus towards Ukraine’s southeast, in a bid to
create a land bridge between occupied Crimea and Moscow-backed separatist
regions in the region of Donbas.
Ukraine Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk on
Wednesday warned residents in the eastern Kharkiv, Lugansk, and Donetsk regions
to leave immediately due to a feared Russian attack.
“It has to be done now because later people will be
under fire and face the threat of death,” she wrote on Telegram.
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said there was no sign
Putin had dropped “his ambition to control the whole of Ukraine”.
“We have to be realistic and realize that this may
last for a long time, for many months, for even years,” he said ahead of a
meeting with NATO foreign ministers.
‘Slashed their throats’
Zelensky called for Russia’s exclusion from the UN Security Council,
where it is one of five members with veto power, and made an impassioned plea
for action in response to the civilian killings.
“They cut off
limbs ... slashed their throats. Women were raped and killed in front of their
children,” he said, after earlier comparing Russia’s assault to the 1937 Nazi
bombing of the town of Guernica.
The US and Britain
have also pressed to have Russia excluded from the
UN Human Rights Council,
with a vote in the General Assembly scheduled for Thursday.
At his weekly
audience at the Vatican, Pope Francis deplored the “powerlessness of
international organizations” before what he called “ever more horrendous
cruelties”, before kissing a flag brought from Bucha.
Thousands of
people have been killed and more than 11 million have been displaced as refugees
or within Ukraine since
Russia invaded, sparking Europe’s largest refugee
crisis since World War II.
Western powers have already pummeled Russia with debilitating economic
sanctions, which forced Moscow Wednesday to make foreign debt payments on
dollar-denominated bonds in rubles, raising the prospect of a potential
default.
Washington’s new
sanctions targeted Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, two adult daughters
of Putin, plus the wife and daughter of
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and
members of the Russia’s Security Council.
The White House
also declared “full blocking” sanctions on Russia’s largest public and private
financial institutions, Sberbank and Alfa Bank, and said all new US investment
in Russia was now prohibited.
Britain meanwhile
froze the overseas assets of Sberbank — Russia’s largest bank — and
Credit Bank of Moscow.
Prime Minister
Boris Johnson had earlier said what happened in Bucha “doesn’t look far short
of genocide to me”.
EU ‘indecisiveness’
The EU is also poised to implement a fifth round of sanctions cutting off
Russian coal imports — and European Council chief
Charles Michel said that
“sooner or later”, it must also impose oil and gas sanctions.
Condemning “war
crimes” in Russia, he said: “There must be, and there will be, severe
consequences for all those responsible.”
But addressing the
Irish parliament Wednesday, Zelensky condemned the “indecisiveness” on the part
of European nations dependent on Russian energy.
He called for the
total exclusion of Russian banks from Western finance.
In other moves to
isolate Moscow, EU countries including
Germany, France, Italy and Spain have
expelled more than 200 Russian diplomats and staff between them this week.
The Kremlin called
the mass expulsions a “short-sighted move” that would complicate efforts to
negotiate an end to the hostilities.
Peace talks
between the sides have so far gone nowhere, though Moscow says it is “ready” to
continue.
Putin also warned of
“reprisals” for recent European measures targeting Russian gas giant Gazprom —
and said Moscow would “monitor” its food exports to “hostile” nations, raising
the spectre of shortages and price spikes.
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