U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that scenes of dead Ukrainians tied up and left lying on the streets of Bucha don’t “look far short of genocide.”
“When you look at what’s happening in Bucha, the revelations that we are seeing from what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has done in Ukraine, which doesn’t look far short of genocide to me, it is no wonder that people are responding in the way that they are,” he told journalists on a visit to a hospital on Wednesday.
“I have no doubt that the international community — Britain very much in the front rank — will be moving again in lockstep to impose more sanctions and more penalties on Vladimir Putin’s regime.”
After Russian troops partially withdrew last week from Bucha, a town just a few dozen kilometers northwest of central Kyiv, authorities discovered roads lined with civilians apparently tied up and shot at close range, as well as mass graves of local residents.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez also suggested the events at Bucha count as genocide Monday, saying he “would do everything possible so that those who have perpetrated these war crimes do not go unpunished and appear before the International Criminal Court” for charges of “war crimes and, why not say it, genocide.”
Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was still more forceful, arguing Monday that “this is genocide, and must be judged” as such.
Russia has denied its troops were responsible for the scenes, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying Tuesday that the scenes were a “provocation” by Ukraine meant to disrupt ongoing negotiations. “In recent days the propaganda machines of the West and Ukraine have been working exclusively to inflate hysteria,” he said.
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