Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross have a duty to respond after the shelling of a prison complex in Donetsk province killed prisoners. “It was a deliberate Russian war crime, a deliberate mass killing of Ukrainian prisoners of war,” Zelensky said in a video clip late Friday. “There should be clear legal recognition of Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.” Separatist authorities and Russian officials said the attack killed 53 Ukrainian prisoners and wounded 75 others. Russia’s Defense Ministry on Saturday released a list of the names of 48 Ukrainian fighters, aged between 20 and 62, who died in the attack. it was unclear whether the ministry had revised its death toll. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has organized civilian evacuations in the war and worked to monitor the treatment of prisoners held by Russia and Ukraine, said it had requested access to the prison “to determine the health and condition of all of people who are present on the spot at the time of the attack”. “Our priority at this time is to ensure that the injured receive life-saving treatment and that the bodies of those who have lost their lives are treated with dignity,” the Red Cross said. Both sides claimed the prison attack was premeditated and intended to silence Ukrainian prisoners and destroy evidence, including possible atrocities. Russia claimed that Ukraine’s military used precision rocket launchers supplied by the US to target the prison in Olenivka, a settlement controlled by the Moscow-backed Donetsk People’s Republic. The Ukrainian military, however, denied carrying out any rocket or artillery attack on Olenivka. He accused the Russians of bombing the prison to cover up the alleged torture and execution of Ukrainians there. Elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, Russian missiles hit a school in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, overnight, and another attack came an hour later, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Saturday. There were no immediate reports of injuries. The bus station in the city of Sloviansk was also hit, according to mayor Vadim Lyakh. Sloviansk is near the frontline of the fighting as Russian and separatist forces try to take full control of the Donetsk region, one of two eastern provinces that Russia has recognized as sovereign states. In southern Ukraine, one person was killed and six wounded in shelling that hit a residential area in Mykolaiv, a major port city, the region’s administration said Saturday on Facebook. Friday’s attack on the prison reportedly killed Ukrainian soldiers captured in May after the fall of Mariupol, a Black Sea port city where troops and the Azov National Guard Regiment faced a months-long Russian siege. On Saturday, an association of Azov relatives of fighters, dressed in black, held a demonstration outside Kyiv’s Hagia Sophia Cathedral and issued a statement calling for Russia to be designated a terrorist state for violating Geneva Convention rules on the treatment of prisoners of war. A woman with dark glasses who gave only her first name, Iryna, was waiting for news about her 23-year-old son. “I don’t know how he is, where he is, if he’s alive or not. I do not know. It’s horror, just horror. For a mother, it is the biggest loss if her child is gone,” he said. Moscow opened an investigation into the attack on the POW prison, sending a team from Russia’s Investigative Committee, the country’s main criminal investigation agency. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said competing claims and limited information prevented it from assigning full responsibility for the attack, but “available visual evidence appears to support the Ukrainian claim more than Russian”. On the energy front, Russia’s state-owned natural gas company said on Saturday it had halted shipments to Latvia due to contract violations. Gas giant Gazprom said shipments were halted because Latvia violated “conditions for gas extraction.” He did not provide further details. The statement likely referred to a refusal to meet Russia’s demand for gas payments in rubles rather than other currencies. Gazprom had previously suspended gas shipments to other EU countries, including the Netherlands, Poland and Bulgaria, because they would not pay in rubles. EU states are scrambling to secure other sources of energy, fearing Russia will cut off more gas supplies as winter approaches. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk warned on Saturday that parts of the Donetsk region that remain under Ukrainian control will face severe heating problems this winter due to widespread destruction of natural gas pipelines in the war. He asked for the mandatory evacuation of the residents of the area before the cold starts.
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