KYIV, Ukraine -- The presidents of four countries on Russia's doorstep visited Ukraine on Wednesday and underscored their support for the embattled country, where they saw heavily damaged buildings and demanded accountability for what they called war crimes carried out by Russian forces.
Meanwhile, a day after he called Russia's actions in Ukraine "a genocide," President Joe Biden approved $800 million in new military assistance to Ukraine, saying weapons from the West have sustained Ukraine's fight so far and "we cannot rest now." The weapons include artillery systems, armored personnel carriers and helicopters.
In the meantime, the visit by the presidents of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia was a show of solidarity from the countries on NATO's eastern flank, three of them -- like Ukraine -- once part of the Soviet Union. The leaders traveled by train to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, to meet with their counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and visited Borodyanka, one of the nearby towns where evidence of atrocities was found after Russian troops withdrew to focus on the country's east.
"The fight for Europe's future is happening here," Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said, calling for tougher sanctions, including against Russia's oil and gas shipments and all the country's banks.
Russia invaded on Feb. 24 with the goal, according to Western officials, of taking Kyiv, toppling the government and installing a Moscow-friendly one. But the ground advance slowly stalled and Russia lost potentially thousands of fighters. The conflict has killed untold numbers of Ukrainian civilians and forced millions more to flee.
Appearing alongside Zelenskyy in Kyiv's historic Mariinskyi Palace on Wednesday, Nauseda, Estonian President Alar Karis, Poland's Andrzej Duda and Egils Levits of Latvia reiterated their commitment to supporting Ukraine politically and with military aid.
"We know this history. We know what Russian occupation means. We know what Russian terrorism means," Duda said. He added that both those who committed war crimes and those who gave the orders should be held accountable.
"If someone sends aircraft, if someone sends troops to shell residential districts, kill civilians, murder them, this is not war," he said. "This is cruelty, this is banditry, this is terrorism."
In his daily late-night address, Zelenskyy noted that the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, visited the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where more than 400 bodies were found, on Wednesday as an investigation by the court gets underway. Evidence of mass killings of civilians was found there after the Russian retreat.
"It is inevitable that the Russian troops will be held responsible. We will drag everyone to a tribunal, and not only for what was done in Bucha," Zelenskyy said late Wednesday.
He also said work was continuing to clear tens of thousands of unexploded shells, mines and trip wires left behind in northern Ukraine by the departing Russians. He urged people returning to homes to be wary of any unfamiliar objects and report them to police.
Residents in Yahidne, a village near the northern city of Chernihiv, said Russian troops forced them to stay for almost a month in the basement of a school, allowing them outside only to go to the toilet, cook on open fires -- and bury the dead in a mass grave.
In one of the rooms, they wrote a list of those who perished. It had 18 names.
"An old man died near me and then his wife died next," Valentyna Saroyan said. "Then a man died who was lying there, then a woman sitting next to me. ... Another old man looked so healthy, he was doing exercises, but then he was sitting and fell. That was it."
Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied his troops committed atrocities, saying Tuesday that Moscow "had no other choice" but to invade and would "continue until its full completion and the fulfillment of the tasks that have been set." He insisted Russia's campaign was going as planned despite a major withdrawal after its forces failed to take the capital and suffered significant losses.
Russian troops are now gearing up for a major offensive in the eastern Donbas region, where Moscow-allied separatists and Ukrainian forces have been fighting since 2014, and where Russia has recognized the separatists' claims of independence.
A key piece of the Russian campaign is Mariupol, which lies in the Donbas and which the Russians have pummeled since nearly the start of the war.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj.-Gen. Igor Konashenkov said 1,026 troops from the Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade surrendered at a metals factory in the city. But Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, rejected the claim, telling Current Time TV that "the battle over the seaport is still ongoing today."
It was unclear when a surrender may have occurred or how many forces were still defending Mariupol.
Russian state television broadcast footage Wednesday that it said was from Mariupol showing dozens of men in camouflage walking with their hands up and carrying others on stretchers or in chair holds. One man held a white flag. In the background was a tall industrial building with its windows shattered and roof missing, identified by the broadcaster as the Iliich metalworks.
In a Twitter post, Zelenskyy adviser Oleksiy Arestovych did not comment on the surrender claim but said elements of the same brigade managed to link up with other Ukrainian forces in the city as a result of a "risky maneuver."
U.S. WEAPONS PACKAGE
Biden's new package of military assistance will provide additional helicopters and the first provision of American artillery.
The Ukrainians also will receive armored personnel carriers, armored Humvees, naval drone vessels used in coastal defense, and gear and equipment used to protect soldiers in chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological attacks.
"This new package of assistance will contain many of the highly effective weapons systems we have already provided and new capabilities tailored to the wider assault we expect Russia to launch in eastern Ukraine," Biden said.
"The steady supply of weapons the United States and its allies and partners have provided to Ukraine has been critical in sustaining its fight against the Russian invasion," Biden added. "It has helped ensure that Putin failed in his initial war aims to conquer and control Ukraine."
The aid is the latest in a series of U.S. security assistance packages valued at a combined $2.6 billion that has been committed to Ukraine since Russia invaded. The weaponry and support material has played an important role in Ukraine's successful defense thus far.
The Pentagon said the $800 million package announced by Biden includes weapons and equipment that will require some training for a Ukrainian military not fully accustomed to American military technology.
The new arms package includes 18 of the U.S. Army's 155mm howitzers and 40,000 artillery rounds, two air surveillance radars, 300 Switchblade "kamikaze" armed drones, and 500 Javelin missiles designed to knock out tanks and other armor. Also included are 10 counter-artillery radars used to track incoming artillery and other projectiles to determine their point of origin for counter attacks.
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said delivery of the material will be expedited, but he offered no specific timetable.
MACRON CHOOSING WORDS
French President Emmanuel Macron declined Wednesday to call the actions of Russian troops in Ukraine "genocide," saying that "an escalation of rhetoric" would not help stop the war after both Biden and Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas used the term.
Macron told a French broadcaster that he was "careful" about using "such terms today because these two peoples [Russians and Ukrainians] are brothers."
"What we can say for sure is that the situation is unacceptable and that these are war crimes," Macron said. "We are living through war crimes that are unprecedented on our soil -- our European soil."
Oleg Nikolenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, blasted Macron's remarks, saying his "unwillingness to recognize the genocide of Ukrainians after all the outspoken statements of [the] Russian leadership and criminal actions of [the] Russian military is disappointing."
"'Brotherly' people do not kill children," Nikolenko said, adding that "there is no moral, no real reason to conduct conversations about the 'brotherly' relations of Russian and Ukrainian peoples."
The United Nations, which first recognized genocide as a crime under international law in 1946, defines it as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
U.N. officials are judicious in using the term; the agency has noted that it is frequently misused "in referring to large scale, grave crimes committed against particular populations." Only a few incidents have been defined as genocide by judicial bodies, the United Nations said, including the 1994 killings of the minority Tutsi in Rwanda.
LOOKING FOR EVIDENCE
Investigators from almost a dozen countries combed bombed-out towns and freshly dug graves in Ukraine on Wednesday for evidence of war crimes, and a wide-ranging investigation by an international security organization detailed what it said were "clear patterns" of human-rights violations by Russian forces.
Some of the atrocities may constitute war crimes, said investigators from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who examined myriad reports of rapes, abductions and attacks on civilian targets, as well as the use of banned munitions.
An International Criminal Court investigation into possible war crimes has been underway since last month, and a number of countries have been looking at ways for the United Nations to help create a special court that could prosecute Russia for what is known as the crime of aggression. Other possibilities include trying Russians in the courts of other nations under the principle of universal jurisdiction, the legal concept that some crimes are so egregious that they can be prosecuted anywhere.
Still, experts warned that the process would be slow, and that any early indictments would most likely be against lower-ranking Russian officials and armed service members. Russia, which has described the accusations as fictional or unfounded, is not expected to cooperate in any prosecution.
The report released Wednesday by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 57-member organization based in Vienna that includes Russia, Ukraine and the United States, is one of the first in-depth studies of human-rights abuses during Russia's offensive against Ukraine.
Investigators looked at some of the most notorious attacks and other violent acts of the war, including Russia's bombings of a theater and a maternity hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol, both depicted in the report as apparent war crimes.
Russia declined to cooperate with the three-person team of investigators, making it "impossible for the mission to take account of the Russian position on all pertinent incidents," the report said.
Investigators found that Ukrainian forces, too, had been guilty of some abuses, particularly in the treatment of prisoners of war. "The violations committed by the Russian Federation, however, are by far larger in nature and scale," their report said.
Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the report "documents the catalog of inhumanity perpetrated by Russia's forces in Ukraine." The European Union issued a similarly positive appraisal.
"This war is not only fought on the ground," the bloc said in a statement. "It is clear that the Kremlin is also waging a shameful disinformation campaign in order to hide the facts of Russia's brutal attacks on civilians in Ukraine. Reliable information and collection of facts have therefore never been as important as today."
The Kremlin's own mission to the organization dismissed the findings as "unfounded propaganda."
Legal experts did not rule out the possibility, some day, of an indictment of Putin, who has already been castigated as a war criminal by some Western leaders.
David Crane, a legal scholar at Syracuse University who was the chief prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone, an international war crimes tribunal that convicted former Liberian President Charles Taylor, said he was confident that the International Criminal Court or some other judicial body would find legal grounds to charge the Russian president.
And even if Putin is never arrested and remains the leader of Russia, he said, the legal and diplomatic consequences of a war crimes indictment would severely undermine his credibility.
It would be as if "there's like an ash mark on his forehead," Crane said. "There's no good options for him."
Information for this article was contributed by Adam Schreck, Oleksandr Stashevskyi, Zeke Miller, Robert Burns and staff members of The Associated Press; Jennifer Hassan and Brittany Shammas of The Washington Post; and Marc Santora, Erika Solomon and Carlotta Gall of The New York Times.
The father and a friend of Anatoliy Kolesnikov, 30, who was killed by Russian soldiers in his car trying to evacuate from Irpin, mourns his death while waiting outside the morgue in Bucha, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday , April 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
Men wearing protective gear exhume the bodies of civilians killed during the Russian occupation in Bucha, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 13, 2022. Dozens of bodies of civilians executed by the Russian troops have been exhumed already from the mass grave. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Firefighters work to extinguish a fire after shelling in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Andrew Marienko)
Engineers inspect the state of destruction of the bridge that connects Kyiv with Irpin, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
Natalya Verbova, 49, and her son Roman Verbovyi, 23, attend the funeral of her husband Andriy Verbovyi, 55, who was killed by Russian soldiers while serving in Bucha territorial defense, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday , April 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
In this image provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attends a news conference during his meeting with Lithuania's President Gitanas Nauseda, Polish President Andrzej Duda, Latvian President Egils Levits and Estonia's President Alar Karis in Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 13, 2022. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP)
A serviceman stands at a building damaged during fighting in Mariupol, on the territory which is now under the Government of the Donetsk People's Republic control, eastern in Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Alexei Alexandrov)
In this image provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, from left: Lithuania's President Gitanas Nauseda, Polish President Andrzej Duda, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Latvian President Egils Levits and Estonia's President Alar Karis pose for a picture during their meeting in Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 13, 2022. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP)
A fighter from the Donetsk People’s Republic militia walks past a building damaged during action in eastern Mariupol in territory now under the government of the breakaway republic. (AP/Alexei Alexandrov)Gallery: Images from Ukraine, month 2
