Here are the Sanctions Western Nations Are Preparing in Response to Bucha Genocide – While an expedited investigation into reports of war crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine – including the targeting of historic and cultural sites as well as residential buildings – remains ongoing, new reports that innocent civilians were executed by Russian troops in Bucha have prompted a slew of new sanctions from the West.
On Saturday, disturbing images from the Ukrainian town Of Bucha were published showing the dead bodies of innocent civilians in the street by Agence France-Presse. After five weeks of constant military action in Bucha, officials and human rights organizations have blamed the deaths of scores of civilian people in the region on Russian forces.
Bucha Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk told Reuters over the weekend how corpses line the streets of the town.
“Corpses of executed people still line the Yabluska street in Bucha. Their hands are tied behind their backs with white ‘civilian’ rags, they were shot in the back of their heads. So you can imagine what kind of lawlessness they perpetrated here,” Fedoruk said.
Zelenskyy Condemns War Crimes and Mass Graves
In a rare trip outside of Ukraine’s capital city on Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited to the Bucha suburb to see for himself what atrocities were committed by Russian troops.
“These are war crimes and this will be recognized by the world as genocide,” Zelenskyy said.
“We know that thousands of people have been killed and tortured…Their limbs were cut off. Raped women, killed children. I think that this is … actually genocide.”
Stopping short of calling the war crimes committed by Russian troops a “genocide,’ U.S. President Joe Biden also said on Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “war criminal” and insisted that he must be held accountable.
As part of ongoing efforts to hold Putin accountable, the United States and Europe are preparing a number of new sanctions against Russia.
What the U.S. and Europe Are Preparing
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that the United States plans to announce details of new sanctions against Russia later this week, with a view to raising “pressure” and to “raise the cost on Putin and Russia.”
Sullivan did not, however, detail what new sanctions will be implemented.
President Joe Biden also said on Monday that he is “going to continue to add more sanctions,” but again, didn’t provide any details on what those new sanctions will entail.
Some European Union countries, however, are reportedly pushing the political bloc to implement new sanctions against Russia in response to the atrocities committed in Bucha and throughout the rest of Ukraine.
Diplomats familiar with discussions say that the European Commission was already considering measures that would focus on closing loopholes and making sanctions evasion harder. Other measures being considered by the European Commission include sanctions on banks that have already been cut off from the SWIFT global payment system, increasing sanctions on individuals, and strengthening sanctions already placed on the export of technology to Russia.
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
