As the evidence mounts pointing to Russian war crimes near Kyiv, the US has responded by sanctioning President Putin’s daughters.
Galvanised by the images of corpses littering the streets of areas the Russians had withdrawn from, and stories of rape and murder from survivors, the US announced a new round of measures against Russian officials and their families and two major banks.
A US official told journalists that Mr Putin and his inner circle were believed to hide their wealth with family members who would then place it in the Western financial system.
US President Joe Biden called the killings “major war crimes”.
Forced to address the issue, Mr Putin on Wednesday called the killings in the town of Bucha a “crude and cynical provocation by the Kyiv regime” – even though satellite images have shown the civilians were killed when Russians were in control of Bucha.
The US said that Mr Putin’s daughters, Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova and Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova, were being put under sanctions “for being the adult children of Putin, a person whose property and interests in property are blocked”.
The two are the daughters of President Putin and his ex-wife Lyudmila. The pair married in 1983 when she was a flight attendant and he a KGB officer. Their marriage lasted 30 years, spanning Mr Putin’s rapid rise to the top of Russia’s political system.
The US announcement described Ms Tikhonova as “a tech executive whose work supports the GoR [Russian government] and defense industry”. Her sister, Ms Vorontsova, it went on, “leads state-funded programs that have received billions of dollars from the Kremlin toward genetics research and are personally overseen by Putin”.
‘I wish they had killed me, too’
In Bucha itself, the BBC’s Joel Gunter has been speaking to survivors, including Iryna Abramov whose husband Oleg was forced to kneel on the street and shot in the head at point blank range by Russian soldiers.
When Iryna ran out and found his disfigured body, the four Russian soldiers who dragged him out were standing casually drinking water, she said. She screamed at them to shoot her, and one raised his gun, then lowered it, then raised it again, and lowered it, until her father dragged her back inside the gate.
“Those soldiers told us we had three minutes to leave and they forced us to run in our slippers,” Iryna’s father Volodymyr said. “Bucha was like an apocalypse – dead bodies everywhere, the streets full of smoke.”
Bowen: This is the worst I have seen around Kyiv
The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen has been to Borodyanka near Kyiv and heard from witnesses that Russian troops stopped attempts to dig survivors out of wrecked buildings, threatening people who wanted to do so at gunpoint.
Several blocks of flats in the town were completely flattened.
“There are a lot of people left under the rubble,” confirmed Maria, who was busy sorting mirrors and pictures that could be salvaged and throwing the rest into a skip behind her apartment block. “My soul hurts. I knew all those people. We knew they were there from the first day, but they wouldn’t let us get them out.”
Maria and many others told us that Russian troops looted their property.
The Russians “stole everything that glittered,” she said. “They even took my lingerie. They beat everything, they gutted everything… it’s all smashed.”
Residents in Ukraine’s east told to leave while they can
Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk issued a stark warning to people living in eastern areas of the country.
She told them that if they did not leave now, Ukraine would not be able to help them as Russia’s invading forces move in – and they could face the kind of atrocities seen in other Russian-occupied areas.
Russia has withdrawn from parts of northern Ukraine to focus on eastern areas.
Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday they were expecting a major offensive.
Source: BBC News