- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday.
- He shared the findings at Izium, where bodies trapped under rubble and a mass grave were discovered.
- One man was deported, and “it’s not the first time,” Zelensky said.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged UN members to confront their Russian counterparts about another horrific act of violence that Ukrainian officials previously said took place throughout the six-month-long invasion and was recently discovered in Izium: castration.
“Ask the Russian delegation why the Russian military is so obsessed,” Ukraine’s president said in an emotional speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday. “What was done to them to make them want to do it to others?”
In a pre-recorded speech, Zelensky called for peace and demanded a “full package” of sanctions against Russia to punish them for what he said were crimes during the invasion of Ukraine.
During the rally, the Ukrainian president also said that excavation work is underway at the Izium mass grave, which contains 445 graves, and he shared some of the violent results in the Kharkiv region.
“The bodies of men and women, children and adults, civilians and soldiers were found there,” Zelensky said.
“There’s a family that died under the rubble of a house in a Russian airstrike – a father, mother, six- and eight-year-old girls, grandparents. There’s a man who was strangled with a rope. There’s a woman. Her body Broken ribs and bruises. There is a man who was deported before the killing, and this is not the first case,” he said, later questioning why Russian soldiers were indiscriminately killing people.
This is not the first time that a Ukrainian official has reported violent actions by Russian troops against civilians.
In July, Ukrainian MP Inna Sovsun shared footage depicting the deportation of a Ukrainian prisoner by Russian soldiers, although the identities of the victims and perpetrators were not clear.
Another image appeared online a week after a skull on a stick outside a building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Popasna, which was captured by the Russian military. Serhii Haidai, the governor of the Ukrainian Luhansk province, suggested that the skill belonged to a Ukrainian prisoner and was placed on a stick by Russian soldiers.
