the ukrainian president Volodimir Zelensky met this Friday with the United States Attorney General Merrick Garland and with senior European judicial officials, to whom he asked that Russia be prosecuted internationally for war crimes.
The meetings took place in the western Ukrainian city of Lvivhundreds of kilometers from the war front.
“We are doing everything possible to ensure that the International Criminal Court succeed in punishing Russian war criminals,” Zelensky declared.
“The main theme of all these meetings and of the meeting in Lviv it is accountability,” he added. “The accountability of Russia and its leaders is personal, for the aggression and terror against our State and our people”.
Zelensky indicated that so far there have been more than 70,000 Russian war crimes.
“But unfortunately, at the moment we don’t know all the crimes,” he said. “A large part of our territory is still under occupationand currently we cannot reliably predict how many Russian crimes we would uncover after the expulsion of the invaders.”
Together with Garland, they participated in the conference the Great Britain Attorney General Victoria Prentis; he Attorney General of the State of Spain, Álvaro García Ortiz, and the European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders.
Meanwhile, in the United Nationsthe deputy spokesperson farhan haq assured that the humanitarian personnel of the UN is reporting “intense hostilities” near the embattled Ukrainian city of Bakhmutnoting that the world body’s few humanitarian partners on the ground are focusing on evacuating the most vulnerable people from the conflict zone.
Bakhmut has been the focus of intense fighting for months, in which Russian soldiers, including large forces from the mercenary group Wagnerare getting closer and closer to the city, largely destroyed.
“The divisions of the Wagner Group have practically surrounded Bakhmut, there is only one road left”, expressed the owner of the Russian group Yevgeny Prigozhin In a message published by his press service, which is addressed to the President of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenskyas reported by the Russian news agency TASS.
The deputy defense minister ukrainian, Hanna Maliarannounced on Wednesday the decision to send reinforcements to Bakhmut, in the face of recent Russian advances around a key location for the interests of the Kremlin in eastern Ukraine.
Russian troops have recently achieved significant advances by taking the surrounding enclaves of the region. Moscow attaches special strategic value to Bakhmut, since a large part of the supplies that kyiv He sends his troops to the eastern front of the conflict.
Previously, a Ukrainian officer, identified by the name of “Magiar”, pointed out in Telegram that his unit had been ordered to fall back from Bakhmutwhere until now some 4,500 civilians of the more than 70,000 who lived in the city before the outbreak of the war.
Zelensky has declared that Ukrainian troops will defend Bakhmut “as long as it’s reasonable”Therefore, its withdrawal to defensive lines located to the west of the city is not ruled out.
(With information from The Associated Press, EFE and Europa Press)
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Source-www.infobae.com