Russian withdrawal reveals atrocities in sixth week of the war in Ukraine
Russia prepares for a major push in the east during the war’s second phase, and leverages energy exports to strengthen the rouble
As Russian forces prepared to redeploy from Kiev to the eastern Donbas region in the sixth week of the war in Ukraine, the towns and villages they evacuated were found strewn with the corpses of tortured and mutilated civilians.
In the town of Bucha, northwest of Kiev, the mayor estimated that 300 people had been killed. Reporters found dozens of bodies in two mass graves, and residents gave Al Jazeera gruesome descriptions of harassment and threatened execution.
Human Rights Watch said it documented war crimes by Russian forces in the areas of Kiev, Kharkiv and Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine. They included a case of repeated rape and two cases of summary execution. One of those executions was in Bucha on March 4, HRW says.
“You may remember I got criticised for calling [Russian president Vladimir] Putin a war criminal,” said US president Joe Biden on April 4. “Well, the truth of the matter - you saw what happened in Bucha. This warrants him – he is a war criminal.”
The Russian defence and foreign ministries have denounced the reports of war crimes.
“This information should be seriously doubted. From what we have seen, the video material can’t be trusted, as our specialists from the defence ministry detected signs of video forgery and various fakes. The facts, the chronology of events also doesn’t speak in favor of the credibility of these claims ... We would require many world leaders not to rush with statements, groundless accusations,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on April 4.
The US, France and Germany expelled dozens of Russian diplomatc in response to the alleged atrocities. Other EU members followed suit. The UN Security Council has been unable to criticise Russia due to the fact that Russia is a permanent member with veto power. On April 5, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy advised the council to remove Russia or dissolve itself.
Reorientation
The towns surrounding Kiev were evacuated as part of a Russian plan to focus its firepower in the east of the country.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said on March 30 that about a fifth of Russian forces besieging Kiev, Chernihiv and Sumy in the north of the country were being withdrawn northwards.
Lieutenant-general Andreas Iliopoulos says he believes Russia will soon launch a battle to take the port of Odessa in the west, thus completing its conquest of the Ukrainian littoral and turning the Black Sea into ‘a Russian lake”.
“An amphibious landing to take Odessa is an easy matter for Russia, which has superiority in the Black Sea,” he said.
Three Russian missiles are reported to have struck an oil refinery on the city’s outskirts on April 1, in what may have been the opening salvo of the battle of Odessa. The attack occurred during a visit by the Greek foreign minister to the city’s large ethnic Greek minority.
Iliopoulos believes part of this second phase of operations will be the conquest of “the areas east of the Dnieper river, to encircle the Ukrainian forces there and force them to surrender... While Ukrainian forces remain there, they will be a Russian target.”
Russia’s ultimate goals in Ukraine have gradually become clear, Iliopoulos said.
“Russia’s strategic goals will be to partition Ukraine along the Dnieper river, with Russia taking the east side. It will seek to cut off Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea, and to take over nine of Ukraine’s fifteen nuclear power plants,” said Iliopoulos, an ex-marine who until recently served as deputy chief of the Hellenic Army.
“[Russia] will then have the richest part of Ukraine, which contains all of its natural gas and exportable metals, and then it will sit down to negotiate. But I don’t think it’ll give anything back. You don’t sign away what you’ve won by blood.”
Russia recognised Ukraine’s eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk as independent republics on February 21.
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told state television that the strategic importance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was to re-establish Russia as an equal to the US and China on the world stage.
“The unipolar world is irretrievably receding into the past and a multi-polar world is being born,” Lavrov said on March 31. “There won’t be one single ruler in this new reality. All key states with a decisive influence on the world economy and politics will have to come to terms,” he said. “Nobody on Earth will be considered a second-rate player.”
US and Western observers have expressed doubts about whether the Russian military can achieve these aims.
“We believe that Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions because his senior advisors are too afraid to tell him the truth,” Kate Bedingfield, White House communications director, told reporters on March 31.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development predicted that Russia’s Ukraine’s economy will shrink by 10% this year, and Ukraine’s by 20%. They had been forecast to grow by 3% and 3.5% respectively. It believes growth will fall to a meagre 1.7% in the territories where it operates in eastern Europe, central Asia and the east Mediterranean, down from an original forecast of 4.2%.
Shoring up the rouble
On March 31, Putin said countries sanctioning Russia must pay for their gas imports in roubles. “If such payments [in roubles] are not made, we will consider this a default on the part of buyers, with all the ensuing consequences. Nobody sells us anything for free, and we are not going to do charity either – that is, existing contracts will be stopped,” Putin said.
Although a deadline was set for April 1, the Kremlin later extended it by several weeks. “Payment for actual [gas] deliveries that are going on now does not need to be made today, and it should be made at the end, in the second half of the month of April, or even at the beginning of May,” Peskov told reporters.
Lavrov explained the reasons for rouble-denominated sales during a visit to New Delhi on April 1.
“We do not want to depend on a system, which could be closed at any time; and we do not want to depend on a system which has masters who can steal your money overnight,” Lavrov said, referring to the freezing of Russian Central Bank assets held in Western banks, and Russian institutions’ suspension from the Swift global interbank system.
A second reason might be to shore up the value of the rouble, which has suffered depreciation under sanctions pressure.
In the months preceding its invasion of Ukraine, Russia lowered sales of gas to Europe to the lowest level possible without disturbing long-term contracts. Now it threatens to trigger default clauses, allowing it to legally stop deliveries on those contracts.
An interruption of gas flows would be a shock to Europe, which depended on Russia for a third of its gas last year. The European Commission has said it would take the European Union a year to replace two thirds of those imports.
Germany, Russia’s biggest EU client, has refused to pay for its gas in roubles. On April 6 it was updating its Renewable Energy Sources Act to make the country’s electricity generation fossil fuel-free by 2035. Its previous goal was 2050.
Timeline: Week six of Russia’s war in Ukraine
March 30 – April 5
March 30:
Kiev’s mayor says Russian shelling of the capital has intensified following a Russian pledge to redeploy forces to the eastern Donbas region. Residents in the neighbourhood of Irpin hear shelling and explosions.
The Kremlin deliberates on written terms of peace submitted by Ukraine the previous day in Istanbul. “These proposals will be considered in the near future, reported to the president, and our response will be given,” says Moscow’s chief negotiatior, Vladimir Medinsky.
March 31:
Putin is being misled by advisors too afraid to tell him the truth about the war, the White House says.
A convoy of 45 buses sets out from Lviv under the ICRC, to evacuate civilians from the besieged town of Mariupol. Russian forces force the convoy to turn around, and seize 14 tonnes of food and medical supplies meant for the city’s 100,000 remaining residents.
Russian president Vladimir Putin decrees that “unfriendly’ buyers of Russian gas – meaning countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia for its war in Ukraine – must pay in roubles for a third of that gas. The move is considered an attempt to bolster the currency.
Ukrainian forces are accused of attacking a fuel depot inside Russia. Two helicopters are filmed firing missiles at the depot in Belgorod, about 30km from the Ukrainian border. Ukraine does not confirm the attack.
Ukraine’s atomic energy authority, Energoatom, says Russian troops have departed the Chernobyl nuclear plant and formally handed over control to Ukrainian authorities. It says Russian soliders received “significant doses” of radiation after digging trenches in contaminated soil in the forest surrounding the plant, which was the scene of a nuclear meltdown in 1986.
Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia says it will take steps to officially become part of the Russian Federation. “We will take the relevant legislative steps shortly,” says separatist leader Anatoly Bibilov. “The Republic of South Ossetia will be part of its historic homeland – Russia.”
Russia recognised South Ossetia as an independent state after it fought a brief war with Georgia in 2008. Russia has promised its people citizenship and has garrisoned the region.
April 1
The governor of Ukraine’s southern port of Odessa says air defences thwart an attempted attack on “critical infrastructure facilities, the destruction of which could be dangerous for the civilian population.” However, three Russian missiles are reported to have struck an oil refinery on the city’s outskirts.
During a virtual summit, Chinese and European leaders agree that Russia is endangering global peace and the global economy through its war in Ukraine, but disagree on how to end it.
European Council president Charles Michel and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen call on China not to try to help Russia circumvent sanctions. “Any attempts to circumvent sanctions or provide aid to Russia would prolong the war,” Michel says.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang says Beijing will push for peace in "its own way". President Xi Jinping says he hopes the EU will treat China "independently", an acknowledgment of Europe’s strong political unity with the United States over Ukraine.
An Al Jazeera report reveals that Russia is using proxy groups in Syria to recruit fighters for Ukraine. The groups are apparently co-ordinated through the Wagner Group, a mercenary fighting force close to the Kremlin. Syrian sources say at least two calls have been made for fighters. Putin announced in March he will approve up to 16,000 fighters from the Middle East for deployment in the Donbas.
The Czech foreign ministry publishes an open letter inviting Russian diplomats to defect: “We implore those of you who have a conscience and who maintain the capacity to recognise evil: take yourselves out of this circle of accomplices… please, leave this sinking ship, which only attracts the wrath of freedom-loving people around the world.”
April 2
As Russian troops withdraw from Bucha, a town northwest of Kiev, dozens of corpses in civilian clothes are found on the streets. Bucha’s deputy mayor, Taras Sapravskyi, says there are 300 corpses, of which 50 have been summarily executed.
Russia’s defence and foreign ministries say the alleged war crimes are staged by Ukrainian authorities and constitute a “provocation”.
A New York Times investigation comparing film shot on April 1 and satellite images taken during March finds that many of the corpses appear in their present positions between March 9-11, when Russian forces entered Bucha, and March 20-21. Some corpses are next to what look like impact craters. Others appear to have been shot to the head.
Eye witnesses to the Russian incursion in Bucha told Al Jazeera the civilians were shot dead by Russian troops. Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk says 280 bodies have been buried in a mass grave in Bucha. Ukraine’s prosecutor general says the bodies of 410 civilians were removed from Bucha and other towns surrounding Kiev
April 3
Human Rights Watch says it has verified and documented war crimes by Russian occupying forces in the areas of Kiev, Kharkiv and Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine.
Reuters reporters find a 15m-long trench in the vicinity of the Church of St. Andrew in Bucha – which had begun to be used as a mass grave. Elsewhere in the town a second mass grave is found overflowing with bodies. Satellite images showed that work on the St. Andrew trench started on March 10, when Russian forces had just moved into the town. Local residents told reporters the dead lying on the streets of Bucha were their civilians neighbours and had been killed by Russian forces.
April 4
US president Joe Biden calls for Putin to stand a war crimes tribunal for the alleged Russian killings of civilians in Bucha. “We have to gather all the detail” for a trial, he says. National security advisor Jake Sullivan says the killings were part of a premeditated plan to imprison or kill dissidents. “We don’t believe this is just a random accident… we believe this was part of the plan,” he says.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismisses the evidence of apparent Russian atrocities in Buch as “video forgery and various fakes”. He says Russia will attempt to hold a UN Security Council discussion about what Russia calls “Ukrainian provocations” in Bucha.
April 5
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy tells the UN Security Council to remove Russia as a permanent member, so that it can no longer block decisions against it. “Either remove Russia as the aggressor or, if you can’t do anything, then dissolve yourself as an entity,” Zelenskyy said.
The UN International Organisation for Migration says internally displaced Ukrainians now number 7.1mn, a 10% increase since March 16.
Al Jazeera uncovers more testimony from Bucha residents saying they have been tortured and their lives threatened by Russian soldiers.