IZYUM, Ukraine, Sept  17, 2022 (BSS/AFP) - The EU presidency on Saturday 
called for the establishment of an international tribunal for war crimes after 
new mass graves were found in Ukraine.
       
"In the 21st century, such attacks against the civilian population are 
unthinkable and abhorrent," said Jan Lipavsky, foreign minister of the Czech 
Republic which holds the European Union's rotating presidency.
       
"We must not overlook it. We stand for the punishment of all war 
criminals," he added in a message on Twitter.
       
"I call for the speedy establishment of a special international tribunal 
that will prosecute the crime of aggression." 
       
The appeal follows the discovery by Ukrainian authorities of around 450 
graves outside the formerly Russian-occupied city of Izyum with most of the 
exhumed bodies showing signs of torture.
      
 "Among the bodies that were exhumed today, 99 percent showed signs of 
violent death," Oleg Synegubov, head of Kharkiv regional administration, said 
on social media.
       
"There are several bodies with their hands tied behind their backs, and one 
person is buried with a rope around his neck," he added.
      
 "Russia leaves only death and suffering. Murderers. Torturers," said 
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky. Some of the remains exhumed included 
children and people who were likely tortured before dying, he added.
      
 US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday said that the graves likely 
provided more evidence that Russia is committing war crimes in its pro-Western 
neighbour, and French President Emmanuel Macron said what happened in Izyum 
were atrocities.
       
"I condemn in the strongest terms the atrocities committed in Izyum, 
Ukraine, under Russian occupation," Macron tweeted.
       
      
 - 'Tortured' -
       
      
 The Ukrainian parliament's human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, said 
there were "probably more than 1,000 Ukrainian citizens tortured and killed in 
the liberated territories of the Kharkiv region". 
      
 Ukraine national police chief Igor Klymenko said they had found multiple 
torture rooms in the town of Balakliya and elsewhere in Kharkiv since the 
Russians were driven out.
      
 The United Nations in Geneva has said it hopes to send a team to determine 
the circumstances of the deaths.
       
The announcement of this macabre discovery has raised a new wave of 
indignation in the West.
       
The discoveries came a little more than five months after the Russian army, 
driven out of the vicinity of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, left behind hundreds 
of corpses of civilians, many of whom bore the traces of torture and summary 
executio       
      
 The European Union is "deeply shocked" at the discovery by Ukrainian 
officials of mass graves in the recaptured city of Izyum, the bloc's foreign 
policy chief Josep Borrell said Friday.
      
 "This inhuman behaviour by the Russian forces, in total disregard of 
international humanitarian law and the Geneva conventions, must stop 
immediately.
      
 On Thursday, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said she wanted Russian 
President Vladimir Putin to face the International Criminal Court over war 
crimes in Ukraine.
     
  In Washington, US President Joe Biden warned his Russian counterpart 
Vladimir Putin against using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons in the wake 
of serious losses in his war in Ukraine.
      
 "Don't. Don't. Don't," Biden said, in an excerpt from an interview with 
CBS' "60 Minutes" aired Friday evening.
      
 Biden was responding to an interviewer's question about the possibility of 
Putin, whose army is incurring heavy losses in the Ukraine counteroffensive 
this month, resorting to chemical or tactical nuclear weapons.
     
  "You would change the face of war unlike anything since World War II," 
Biden said.
       
"They will become more of a pariah in the world, more than they have ever 
been," the US leader added.
       
       - 'Pushing them back' -
       
       On the ground, Ukrainian forces have recaptured thousands of square 
kilometres in recent weeks thanks to a counter-offensive in the north-east and 
now threaten enemy positions in the south, as the fighting and bombings 
continue.
       
The Russians "are angry because our army is pushing them back in its 
counter-offensive," said Svitlana Shpuk, a 42-year-old worker in Kryvyi Rih, a 
southern town, and Zelensky's hometown, which was flooded after a dam was 
destroyed by Russian missiles.
       
The governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleg Synegoubov, said that an 
11-year-old girl was killed by missile fire in the region.
       
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of Donestk in eastern Ukraine which has been 
partially controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014, said on social 
media that Ukrainian firefighters were battling a fire there and that the 
bombing had led to cuts in drinking water.
       
"The occupiers are deliberately targeting infrastructure in the area to try 
to inflict as much damage as possible, primarily on the civilian population," 
he charged.
       
The Russian army denies targeting civilian infrastructure or residential 
areas.
      
 In its daily briefing in Moscow, the Kremlin said it had carried out 
"high-precision" strikes against Ukrainian positions in the Mykolayev and 
Kharkiv regions.
      
 In the relative calm of Kyiv on Saturday, hundreds of Ukrainians took part 
in a farewell ceremony at the Kiev national opera house for former ballet 
dancer and later teacher Oleksandr Shapoval, who was killed at the age of 47 in 
the east of the country while fighting the Russians.
      
 Shapoval was hit by mortar fire on September 12, near the town of Mayorsk 
in the Donetsk region.