Ukraine war: India calls for independent probe, terms reports of Bucha civilian killings ‘deeply durbing’

Describing reports of civilian killings in the Ukrainian city of Bucha as “deeply durbing”, India on Tuesday supported the call for an independent investigation.
“The situation in Ukraine has not shown any significant improvement since the Council last discussed the issue. The security situation has only deteriorated, as well as its humanitarian consequences,” India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador T S Tirumurti told a meeting on Ukraine in the UN Security Council that was addressed for the first time Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Thanking Zelenskyy’s participation at the meeting, Tirumurti said “recent reports of civilian killings in Bucha are deeply durbing. We unequivocally condemn these killings and support the call for an independent investigation.”

India’s condemnation of the killings came on a day when Zelenskyy told the UNSC that the “most terrible war crimes” since World War II are being committed in Ukraine.
“Yesterday I returned from our city of Bucha, recently liberated from Russian troops not far from Kyiv. There is not a single crime that they would not commit. The Russian military searched for and purposefully killed anyone who served our country. They shot and killed women outside their houses when they just tried to call someone who is alive, they killed entire families, adults and children and they tried to burn the bodies,” he said.
President Zelenskyy also told the UNSC that the actions of Russian troops are “no different from other terrors such as Daesh”.
“They pursued a consent policy of destroying ethnic and religious diversity, then inflame wars and deliberately lead them in such a way that to kill as many regular civilians. Some of them were shot on the streets, others were thrown into the wells so they die. They are in suffering. They were killed in their apartments, houses blown up grenades,” he said.

“The civilians were crushed tanks while sitting in their cars in the middle of the road just for their pleasure. They cut off limbs, slashed their throats. Women were raped and killed in front of their children. Their tongues were pulled out only because the aggressors did not want to hear from them,” he added.

The mayor of Bucha, a liberated town 37 km (23 miles) northwest of the capital, had earlier said that 300 residents had been killed the Russian army.

“We are still gathering and looking for bodies, but the number has already gone into the hundreds,” Foreign Miner Dmytro Kuleba said, according to his minry. “Dead bodies lie on the streets. They killed civilians while staying there and when they were leaving these villages and towns,” Kuleba said.