Moscow must face an international war tribunal for atrocities that the Ukrainian city of Bucha suffered in March, Bucha’s Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk demanded on Monday during his trip to the United States.
Fedoruk told Washington think tank the Wilson Centre that Russia has never been punished and has never been brought to the war tribunal, demanding that the world hold Moscow accountable for the atrocities perpetrated by its troop during its occupation of Ukraine.
Fedoruk, whose interviews with international media over the spring and summer of 2022 helped spread the word of Russian war crimes, was in hiding to coordinate assistance for the few thousand people who stayed behind in Bucha during the Russian occupation.
During the same event, former US ambassador and Wilson Centre president Mark Green said that 458 bodies- 419 of which were bearing signs of torture and other mass trauma -were recovered from Bucha’s ruins.
Green emphasized that Bucha represents the world’s first definitive look at how the Russian military employs atrocity as a deliberate tactic in Ukraine.
During their occupation of Bucha, a town about 30km northwest of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, from March 4 to 31, 2022, Russian forces left a trail of evidence of its crimes, according to Ukraine and charities.
According to April’s report by Richard Weir, crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch, nearly every corner in Bucha is now a crime scene, and it felt like death was everywhere.
Human Rights Watch’s report has apparently found extensive evidence of actions that would constitute war crimes and potential crimes against humanity by Russian forces against Ukrainian civilians there in form of enforced disappearances and torture, summary executions, and other unlawful killings.
Moscow has repeatedly and strenuously denied any accusations related to the murder of civilians in Ukraine, claiming that the graves and corpses in Bucha had been staged by Ukraine to tarnish Russia.