On Monday, the Kremlin denied that its troops were involved in the widespread killings in eastern Ukraine and charged Kiev with inventing its reports of the discovery of mass graves in reclaimed area.
In the most recent event that has many worried about an atomic catastrophe, Ukraine said that Russian rockets had come perilously close to a nuclear power plant in the south of the country.
When Ukraine retook Izyum and other eastern towns this month, it severely disrupted the Kremlin’s supply lines and sparked new allegations of Russian atrocities due to the finding of hundreds of graves, some of which contained several victims.
“These are lies,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday. Moscow, he said, “will stand up for the truth in this story”.
Fighting in the northeast has raged and AFP journalists heard artillery exchanges in frontline Kupiansk on Monday, as traumatised civilians headed out of the town now mainly in Ukrainian hands.
Broken glass, spent ammunition casings, and the detritus of ration packs distributed by both sides littered the streets.
The majority of the fighting took place on the town’s western edge, along a network of collapsed bridges, with Ukrainian tanks and artillery aiming their fire at Russian positions. The smoke began to rise in the distance.
People gathered at the town’s entrance to share rides or board buses to travel into safer Ukrainian territory as they cowered in fear from the sounds of Ukrainian tank shells flying overhead and hitting Russian lines.
“It was impossible to stay where we were living,” said 56-year-old Lyudmyla, who braved the constant crack of shells to cross the Oskil river from the disputed east bank to the relative safety of the west.
“There was incoming fire not just every day, but literally every hour. It’s very tough there, on the other bank of the river.”
In his address to the nation on Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Russians were “panicking” as his forces held recaptured territory in the northeastern Kharkiv region.
