Ukraine and Russia have exchanged allegations of a rocket attack or explosion early Friday that appears to have killed dozens of Ukrainian POWs in the frontline town of Olenivka in eastern Donetsk.
Russia invited UN and Red Cross experts to investigate the dead “in the interest of an objective investigation,” the defense ministry said on Sunday.
The ministry had published a list of 50 Ukrainian POWs killed and 73 injured in a Ukrainian military attack with a US-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).
The Ukrainian armed forces denied responsibility, saying Russian artillery had attacked the prison to cover up the beatings there.
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Friday that Russia had committed a war crime and called for international condemnation.
Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs said the EU should publicly condemn the dead and label Russia as a “sponsor of terrorism”.
In a tweet, he said: “I condemn the brutal killing of Ukrainian prisoners of war by the Russian armed forces in Olenivka and the continued atrocities committed by the Russian army against Ukraine.
“The EU should regard Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, I reiterate the proposal to impose an EU tourist visa ban on Russian citizens.”
The UN had said it would be willing to send experts to investigate whether it would get approval from both sides.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it sought entry and offered to help evacuate the wounded.
Ukraine has accused Russia of atrocities against civilians and has identified more than 10,000 possible war crimes. Russia denies targeting civilians and war crimes in the invasion, calling it a “special operation”.
The Ukrainian army said more than 100 Russian soldiers had been killed on Saturday and seven tanks destroyed in the south on Friday, including the Kherson region, which is the center of Kiev’s counter-offensive in that part of the country and a key link in the Moscow supply lines.
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Ukraine has in recent weeks used Western-supplied long-range missile systems to heavily damage three bridges over the Dnipro, cutting off the city of Kherson and — in the opinion of British defense officials — leaving the 49th Russian Army highly vulnerable on the river’s western bank. .
Officials from the Russian-appointed government that governs the Kherson region rejected Western and Ukrainian assessments of the situation earlier this week.
On Friday, the British government described the Russian government as “growing desperate” after it lost tens of thousands of soldiers in the war. Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence chief Richard Moore added on Twitter that Russia is “out of steam”.