Give Ukraine the planes

The retreat of Russian forces around Kyiv has left horrifying evidence of atrocities against civilians littered across the region’s suburbs and towns, turned into hellish war zones by Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

As Ukrainian armoured columns rolled into Bucha, a town north-west of the capital, they found streets blocked by burned-out Russian tanks and military vehicles, and strewn with the bodies of civilians whom locals said had been killed by the invading forces without provocation.

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Reporters from Agence France-Presse saw at least 20 bodies, all in civilian clothing, strewn across a single street in Bucha, and the body of a missing Ukrainian photographer, Maksim Levin, was discovered in a nearby village.

Three of them were tangled up in bicycles after taking their final ride, while others had fallen next to bullet-ridden and crushed cars, AFP reported.

One had his hands tied behind his back with a white cloth, and his Ukrainian passport left open beside his corpse, said journalists who accessed the ravaged town.

“All these people were shot,” Bucha’s mayor Anatoly Fedoruk told AFP, adding that 280 other bodies had been buried in mass graves in the town.

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As the town was liberated, one woman, Halyna Tovkach, 55, told the Guardian that she was searching for the body of her husband, Oleg, 62. He was killed by Russian soldiers along with their neighbours, two young boys and their mother, as they tried to escape the town on 5 March.

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Ukrainian soldiers in Bucha, who were welcomed warmly by residents of the town, attached cables to the bodies and pulled them off the street for fear they may be booby-trapped.

Soldiers also cleared barricades and inspected suspicious objects, placing red rags on remnants of unexploded ordnance to draw attention to the possibility of explosions.

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Ukraine’s attorney general is gathering a dossier of claims about the Russian use of local children to avoid fire when in retreat from around Ukraine’s capital and elsewhere. Coaches of children were said to have been placed in front of tanks in the village of Novyi Bykiv, close to the encircled city of Chernihiv, 100 miles north of Kyiv.

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“We are strengthening our defences in the eastern direction and in Donbas,” [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelenskiy said. “What is the goal of Russian troops? They want to capture both the Donbas and the south of Ukraine.”

But Zelenskiy complained that the “global security architecture has failed” and that Ukraine has “not yet received enough modern western anti-missile systems” from its western allies, nor given aircraft. He added: “Every Russian missile that hits our cities, and every bomb dropped on our people, on our children, only adds black paint to the history that will describe everyone on whom the decision depended.”

  Guardian

Give them the planes. They agreed in a deal some years back to get rid of their nuclear weapons in return for Russia not invading them. Obviously that was a mistake. So now give them the planes. Give them whatever they ask for.