Zelenskiy Says Russia's Military Must Be Put on Trial for War Crimes

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that the Russian military must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes, accusing the Kremlin's troops of the worst atrocities since World War II.

The Ukrainian leader made his plea via video as grisly evidence continued to emerge of civilian massacres carried out by Russian forces on the outskirts of Kyiv before the pulled back from the capital.

The images, particularly from the town of Bucha, have stirred global revulsion and led to demands for tougher sanctions and war crime charges.

Making his first appearance before the U.N.'s highest body, Zeleskyy stressed that Bucha was only one place and there are more with similar horrors, and he called for a tribunal similar to the one that was set up at Nuremberg to try war criminals after World War II.

The grisly scenes of battered and burned bodies and evidence that some of the dead were bound and shot in the head have led Western nations to expel dozens more of Moscow's diplomats and propose further sanctions, including a ban on coal imports from Russia.

Zelenskyy told the Security Council there was "not a single crime" that Russian troops hadn't committed in Bucha.

"The Russian military searched for and purposefully killed anyone who served our country. They shot and killed women outside their houses when they just tried to call someone who is alive. They killed entire families, adults and children, and they tried to burn the bodies," he said.

Associated Press journalists in the town have counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes. Many appeared to have been shot at close range, and some had their hands bound or their flesh burned. A mass grave in a churchyard held bodies wrapped in plastic.

The Kremlin has denounced the images as fake and suggested the scenes were staged by the Ukrainians. But high-resolution satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed that many of the bodies had been lying in the open for weeks, during the time that Russian forces were in the town.

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