Russia-Ukraine War Live Updates: Zelenskiy calls Russian forces ‘butchers’, world leaders condemn atrocities

Russia Ukraine War Crisis Live Updates: World leaders on Sunday condemned the killing of civilians in a suburb of the Ukrainian capital, calling for new sanctions and investigations of alleged war crimes as outrage grew. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy addressed Russian forces as “murderers”, “torturers” and “raps” after hundreds of bodies of Ukrainian civilians were found on the streets of towns surrounding Kyiv. He also vowed to investigate and prosecute all Russian “crimes” in Ukraine, saying he had created a “special mechanism” to do so.
Ukraine’s prosecutor-general says the bodies of 410 civilians have been recovered from Kyiv-area towns. Residents of the Ukrainian town of Bucha near Kyiv have given harrowing accounts of how Russian troops shot and killed civilians without any apparent reason, news agency Reuters reported. According to civilian accounts, Russian soldiers would go from building to building, take people out of the basements where they were hiding, check their phones for evidence of anti-Russian activity and take them away or shoot them.
Meanwhile, Russian units have withdrawn from areas in the country’s north to neighboring Belarus, which served as a staging ground for the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s military General Staff  said in a statement on Sunday. Russian forces also withdrew from the Sumy region, in Ukraine’s northeast, local adminrator Dmitry Zhivitsky said and the Ukraine has also retaken some towns in Chernihiv region.  In other areas recently retaken, including all areas around Kyiv, Ukrainian officials say they have recovered hundreds of slain civilians in the past few days.