Eastern Ukraine Governor Warns of Russian ‘Offensive,’ Urges Residents to Evacuate

Residents of eastern Ukraine were jolted by the sound of air raid sirens Saturday. The region’s governor is warning civilians to evacuate immediately as Russia increases shelling in the area. Governor Serhiy Haidai told a public television station that Russia is “amassing an offensive” on the third of the population that remains in Ukraine’s Luhansk region. 

Military analysts say Russian President Vladimir Putin is redirecting the invasion to eastern Ukraine, after the military met stiff resistance and withdrew from areas around Kyiv in the north. The British Defense Ministry expects increased shelling to continue in the south and east as Russia attempts to create a route between Crimea and the Donbas region. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.   

Zelenskyy appeals for ‘firm global response’

At least 52 people, including five children, died Friday, with scores more injured while trying to evacuate as two missiles hit a train station in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the strike a deliberate attack on civilians and said he expects a “firm global response” to what he labeled “a war crime.”

“Without the strength or courage to stand up to us on the battlefield, [Russian troops] are cynically destroying the civilian population,” Zelenskyy said on social media.

Russia denied carrying out the missile strike, and in turn blamed Ukraine, saying it does not use the short-range kind of missile — the Tochka-U — that hit the station.

However, the website Defence Blog reported March 31 that a convoy of Russian military vehicles were carrying the Tochka-U missiles — known in the West as the SS-21 or Scarab-B — that had been photographed as part of Russia’s invasion force into Ukraine.

Zelenskyy, in an interview scheduled to air on U.S. television Sunday on the CBS program “60 Minutes,” said Ukraine has imprisoned Russian pilots who had maps with civilian targets designated for bombing.

Accusations of war crimes also were made by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who spoke Saturday after seeing the devastation in Bucha, a town near Kyiv.

Mass graves of civilians were unearthed in Bucha after Russian forces left the area.  Von der Leyen said, “If this is not a war crime, what is a war crime, but I am a medical doctor by training and lawyers have to investigate carefully.”

Russian officials have called the Bucha killings a “monstrous forgery.”

VOA in Bucha: makeshift graves in home gardens

VOA’s Heather Murdock is in Bucha, where she took video of fresh graves in gardens on the sides and backyards of houses and of the blood still in the streets. Local residents told her of people dying at the hands of Russian soldiers as they were fleeing the town. Russian soldiers left the city a week ago and the extent of the deaths and destruction they wreaked is just now coming into focus as journalists enter the region.

The Russian invasion has forced more than 10 million people from their homes in Ukraine or from the country altogether, and has killed and maimed thousands. Russia is denying the killing of patients at a destroyed maternity hospital in Mariupol and has blamed Ukrainian missile strikes. Mariupol’s mayor says 50 people burned to death in the shelling of the city. The Associated Press has documented at least 37 Russian attacks on medical buildings since the war began.

British PM visits Kyiv, brings more aid

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson met Saturday in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

After Friday’s attack on the Kramatorsk railway station, Britain announced additional financial and military aid for Ukraine, to include anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles and nearly $130 million worth of high-tech equipment. Johnson called the shelling of the station “unconscionable” and said it is “a war crime indiscriminately to attack civilians.”

The city’s mayor estimated there were 4,000 women, children, and elderly inside the station trying to evacuate the vulnerable region when it was bombed.

Following the lead of the United States, Britain also is placing travel restrictions on and freezing the financial assets of Putin’s adult daughters, Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova, 35, and Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova, 36, along with the daughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

VOA’s Heather Murdock contributed to this report from Bucha, Ukraine.
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