The UN wants to investigate the attack in the Russian-held eastern Ukrainian town of Olenivka, which Moscow said killed 53 Ukrainian prisoners and wounded 75 others.
Ukraine maintains that Thursday night’s deadly bombing was a “war crime,” while Russia claims that Ukraine fired the missiles that destroyed the building. Both sides say the attack was premeditated and intended to silence the prisoners inside and destroy evidence of possible atrocities. “We are ready to send a team of experts capable of conducting an investigation with the permission of the parties,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for the UN Secretary-General, told Russian media. He said the investigation would require the consent of all parties, and added that the UN was supporting the Red Cross’s efforts to gain access to the site. The prison housed nearly 200 soldiers captured in Mariupol, the scene of many of the war’s worst atrocities, including many who endured at the Azovstal steel plant outside the city during weeks of brutal fighting. The United Nations and the Red Cross demanded access to the prison where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners were killed.AP Late Saturday, Russia’s defense ministry released a list of the names of 48 Ukrainian fighters killed in the attack, aged between 20 and 62. It was not immediately clear if the list was to be complete, suggesting that fewer people had been killed than initially reported, or if some names were missing. Russia has not yet said when and how the bodies of the dead soldiers could be recovered, Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said. “I have requested this information. So far, we have not received the lists yet. I know the Russian side has them, but we don’t have them at the moment,” Lubinets said. “I can only get the total numbers – ie how many [prisoners] were kept there, how many were killed, how many were injured.” Moscow said it killed 53 prisoners at Olenivka.NurPhoto via Getty Images Family members of the captives are desperate for information as well. “Right now, my husband is not on the lists and I believe he is alive,” Alina Nesterenko, whose husband was taken to prison after surrendering in Azovstal, told the Guardian. “But many children are dead, many children were injured in Olenivka.” “Three of us haven’t heard anything (from the Ukrainian authorities) so we assume they’re fine, another girl’s husband was injured and then there’s another one whose husband was in the barracks that was hit, but he didn’t hear anything,” he said. Nesterenko. The International Committee of the Red Cross said it requested access “to determine the health and condition of all people who were on site 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 lost their lives are treated with dignity,” the Red Cross said in a statement. Ukraine and Russia, meanwhile, continued to trade accusations over who was responsible for the attack. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the deaths “a deliberate Russian war crime, a deliberate mass killing of Ukrainian prisoners of war,” in a video posted on Facebook late Friday. “There should be clear legal recognition of Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.” Russia and Ukraine continued to blame each other for the attack.REUTERS Ukraine has appealed to the International Criminal Court over the attack. “At this stage of the war, terror for Russia is the main weapon,” Zelensky said in another Facebook video posted Saturday afternoon. “And therefore the main task of every Ukrainian, every defender of freedom and humanity in the world is to do everything to isolate the terrorist state and protect as many people as possible from Russian strikes.” Moscow opened its own investigation into the blast, sending a team from Russia’s main criminal investigation agency to the scene. The state-run RIA Novosti news agency claimed that fragments of US-supplied high-mobility artillery rockets were found at the site, suggesting the attack came from Ukraine. These findings could not be independently verified. The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank, tweeted that “available visual evidence appears to support the Ukrainian claims more than the Russians.” Separately, the Ukrainian military said on Saturday it had killed several Russian soldiers and destroyed two ammunition dumps in fighting in the Kherson region, the focus of Kiev’s counteroffensive in the south and a key link in Moscow’s supply lines. It has been using long-range missile systems supplied by the West to severely damage three bridges on the Dnipro in recent weeks, cutting off the city of Kherson, the first city Russia captured since the February 24 invasion. The first deputy head of the Kherson regional council, Yuriy Sobolevsky, told residents to stay away from Russian ammunition dumps. “The Ukrainian army is throwing it at the Russians and this is just the beginning,” Sobolevsky wrote on the Telegram app. The strikes potentially further isolate Russian forces west of the river from supplies in occupied Crimea and to the east. The UK Ministry of Defense said Russia has resorted to bridges and a ferry system to compensate for the damaged bridges. The offensive is part of a broader effort by Ukraine to regain territory lost to Russia in the eastern and southern regions of the country.

In other war developments in Ukraine

The Ukrainian government announced on Saturday that all civilians in the eastern region of Donetsk, which is partly held by Russia and the scene of fierce ongoing fighting, must be evacuated before winter. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said the order applies to about 200,000 citizens who remain there because there will be no heating fuel or electricity once the weather turns cold.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken discussed efforts to move the first ships carrying Ukrainian grain soon during a conversation with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. Blinken also expressed his condolences for the killing of the prisoners and “reaffirmed the US commitment to hold Russia accountable for the atrocities committed by its forces against the people of Ukraine,” the State Department said. Russia’s state gas company Gazprom halted shipments to NATO member Latvia on Saturday, saying Latvia had brokered “gas extraction terms,” ​​likely referring to the country’s refusal to pay for gas in rubles and not in other currencies. Gazprom suspended shipments and played politics with gas supplies to other European Union countries, including suspending payments to the Netherlands, Poland and Bulgaria because they would not pay in rubles. Russian rockets hit a school building in eastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, overnight, and another attack came about 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 close to the front line of the fighting in the Donetsk region. In southern Ukraine, one person was killed and six were injured in shelling that hit a residential area in Mykolaiv, a major port city, the regional administration said on Saturday.

With Post cables