Russia-Ukraine live updates: Biden calls Putin a ‘war criminal,’ urges building evidence toward ‘war crimes trial’

A Ukrainian official said members of a team from the Red Cross tasked with escorting evacuation buses to and from Mariupol were detained Sunday after failing to reach the city for several days.

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said Monday in a news briefing that the team set out for Mariupol on Sunday and reached the town of Manhush, west of the city, but were arrested. He said Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk is attempting to secure their release into Ukrainian-controlled territory.

It was not immediately clear who is detaining the team members.

The International Committee of the Red Cross told The Post via email on Monday, “Due to security conditions, our team has not been able to reach Mariupol today.”

Vereshchuk had said earlier on Monday that people could flee Mariupol in their own vehicles along a humanitarian corridor to nearby Zaporizhzhia and said 15 evacuation buses “have set off from Zaporizhzhia to Mariupol to evacuate our people.”

The Mariupol City Council posted a video on Telegram on Monday morning of what it said were 15 buses leaving Zaporizhzhia to get to Berdyansk, about 50 miles west of Mariupol.

Vereshchuk also said civilians would be evacuated from five areas in the contested eastern region of Luhansk, on the border with Russia, and accused Russian forces in the region of attacking humanitarian convoys.

Ukrainian officials said thousands of Mariupol residents were evacuated to Ukrainian-controlled territory Friday, but the ICRC said a team of “three vehicles and nine personnel” was unable to reach the city on Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

“For the operation to succeed, it is critical that the parties respect the agreements and provide the necessary conditions and security guarantees,” the organization said in a statement Friday.

Boychenko said Monday that as many as 130,000 people remained trapped in Mariupol in “inhumane” conditions.

NATO countries have made statements in recent days suggesting that eastern expansion could still be on the table for the security alliance, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — which Moscow has partly justified as needed to rein in Ukrainian ambitions of joining NATO — enters its 40th day.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was asked Sunday in an interview with CNN whether the organization expects to receive a membership application from Finland and nearby countries. He said NATO has had productive conversations with the government of Finland and Sweden, and speculated that their applications would be “very much welcomed,” and possibly fast-tracked, if they decided to apply.

Stoltenberg, who is from Norway, a founding NATO member that shares a border with Russia, said it is for individual nations to decide whether they want to join the alliance. In March, a Russian official threatened Finland and Sweden with retaliation if they joined NATO, in remarks published by Russian news agency Interfax.

Putin, in his speech announcing Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine on Feb. 24, said “the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border,” was a fundamental threat to Russian security.

Separately, Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said in an interview published Sunday that Poland would be “pleased” to host more U.S. troops on its soil in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and suggested that his country would be “open” to hosting American nuclear weapons, though he said this scenario was not being discussed.

“Poland would be pleased if the Americans increased their presence in Europe from the current 100,000 soldiers up to 150,000 in the future due to Russia’s increasing aggressiveness,” Kaczynski told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. “Of these, 75,000 soldiers should be stationed on the eastern flank; ie, on the border with Russia; 50,000 soldiers in the Baltic states and Poland.”

The governor of the Mykolaiv region, Vitaliy Kim, said Monday that Russian strikes badly damaged the southern front-line area of Ukraine, with projectiles hitting more than 2,000 buildings — including homes, hospitals and other health facilities.

The strikes have killed at least 161 people, including six children, he said, adding that at least 85 towns and villages were without electricity. His figures could not be independently verified.

Officials are working to fix battered buildings, restore the economy and keep medicines flowing to those who need them, Kim said.

Russian troops have been unable to advance west past Mykolaiv, and the area is widely considered a success story for the Ukrainian resistance.

The governor said that locals were working together “like a family” and that after seeing harrowing scenes from Bucha, where Russia is accused of war crimes, people are “angry” but “inspired” to protect their homes and communities.

Kim said that the Russian attacks were an “attempt to scare” residents but that the situation was “under control.” He said no military facilities had been hit.

Last week, a missile hit a government building in the city of Mykolaiv, killing at least 36 people and injuring others.

BUCHA, Ukraine — There was no celebrating the retreat of Russian forces after weeks of their bombs and bullets in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv. Instead, liberation meant volunteers put the lifeless remains of eight civilians into body bags. It meant uncovering alleged signs of torture and execution, when they recovered men’s bodies with their hands tied.

Larisa Savenko, 72, stayed in a bunker in her home from the day Russian troops invaded her neighborhood on Feb. 27. She stood Sunday before her damaged house — her road now littered with the remnants of Russian tanks, armored vehicles and other military equipment. “I never saw something scarier in my life,” she said. “The gunfire did not stop for a moment.”

At one point during the occupation, five armed Russian soldiers entered her family home, searched their documents and took their phone, she said. “The Russians told us that we are lucky to have them because other Russian troops would have already shot them,” she said.

For weeks, the specter of death was everywhere — and now, even after the Russian retreat, it remains seared in Bucha’s backyards and residential streets.

“The dead civilians were buried all over the place,” said Andrii Zabarylo, 55. “My friend was buried in his yard; a man that got shot by the Russians on a street nearby had to lay there for a week before people came to bury him” because of gunfights.

Tania Grinenko, 37, said her sister’s husband was killed on March 4, the first day Russian troops entered their part of town.

“He was going to the store to buy food, and he got shot on the street,” he said. “And only yesterday [April 2] we could take his body from there to bury him.”

Oleksandr Mykolayovych Yashchenko, 69, said most of those who remain in Bucha were older residents, the grandparents of mothers and children who fled early in the war.

Russians were especially suspicious of any remaining young men, many of whom stayed in the city to take care of elderly relatives, residents said: Russian soldiers would make the men strip and checked them for tattoos or bruises on their knees, which they said could be signs of fighting.

See more from the scene here.

The U.N. Security Council is scheduled to discuss the situation in Ukraine on Tuesday — but will not meet Monday on Russia’s request to rebut allegations that its troops committed atrocities near Kyiv.

As Ukrainian officials and many Western governments alleged over the weekend that Russia committed war crimes in Bucha — a suburb northwest of Kyiv where mass graves full of what appeared to be dead civilians were found following the retreat of Russian forces — Moscow has sought to blame the atrocities on Ukraine and asked for an earlier meeting of the U.N. body.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that the Security Council rejected Russia’s request for a meeting Monday.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said he was “deeply shocked by the images of civilians killed in Bucha” and called for “an independent investigation” and “effective accountability.”

Russian officials have said the photos coming out of Bucha are fake, alleging they were orchestrated by Kyiv as part of a Western-supported campaign of disinformation aimed at discrediting Moscow. Russia’s Investigative Committee said Monday that it would launch a probe into Ukrainian allegations under a provision in the country’s Criminal Code banning “public dissemination of deliberately false information” about the armed forces.

Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, said Sunday that Moscow requested a meeting of the Security Council on Monday to discuss the “heinous provocation of Ukrainian radicals in Bucha.”

It’s not the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that the countries have tried to use the United Nations as a forum to air their grievances against each other.

In the early days of the invasion, Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning its actions in Ukraine; it later passed 141 to 5 (with 35 abstentions) at the U.N. General Assembly. Last month, the Security Council met at the request of Russia to hear allegations from Moscow — dismissed by Washington as “disinformation” — that the United States supported a biological weapons program in Ukraine. There are labs in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics that receive funds from the United States, but their purpose is to study diseases.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was reelected on Sunday, and named Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as among his opponents in a victory speech.

Orban, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has touted himself as a sharp defender of Hungary and its people, casting his lack of intervention on Ukraine’s behalf as a strength.

Speaking to supporters on Sunday, Orban listed the forces his party had struggled against in the election, according to the Associated Press: “The left at home, the international left all around, the Brussels bureaucrats, the Soros empire with all its money, the international mainstream media, and in the end, even the Ukrainian president.”

Olha Stefanyshyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, said Monday that Ukraine expected Orban’s policy of close ties with Russia to continue.

“We calculated that the balance of power in these elections [in Hungary] will be a bit different, the opposition fought hard enough in these elections, but on the other hand we have no new expectations towards the Hungarian side,” she said in a news briefing. “The policy [of friendship with Russia] conducted until now will, we think, settle down.”

While much of the world has jumped to Ukraine’s defense since the Russian invasion, Orban has not, though the country — which borders Ukraine — has taken in hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.

In video remarks released late Saturday, just before Hungary’s election, Zelensky sharply criticized Orban, saying that he was “one person who it seems isn’t fully understanding what’s happening” and “perhaps the only one in Europe who openly supports Mr. Putin.”

“We never asked for anything special from Budapest,” Zelensky said. “We didn’t even get from them what everyone else is doing for peace. … We haven’t seen moral leadership.”

Annabelle Timsit contributed to this report.

Many front pages of European publications Tuesday focused on the alleged atrocities carried out by Russian troops on Ukrainian civilians in the city of Bucha as they pulled back from towns they had seized in the war’s earliest days.

“Horror in Bucha: Russia accused of torture and massacre of civilians,” read the cover of the Guardian. Britain’s Daily Mirror splashed the word “GENOCIDE” on its cover along with an image of the dead lying in the street among the rubble. The newspaper blurred images of the bodies — as did the Times in Britain on its cover.

The Daily Mail called the discovery of mass graves and reports of rape and executions “Putin’s stain on humanity.”

Italy’s la Repubblica also drew attention to the horrors on its front page, zooming in on the hand of a person lying dead in the rubble. Spain’s El País newspaper wrote: “Bucha shows the world the barbarity of Putin’s war.”

Over the weekend, Ukrainian officials requested that the International Criminal Court visit the mass graves found in the suburb, northwest of Kyiv, so experts could gather evidence of possible Russian war crimes “as soon as possible.”

In a tweet Sunday, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, accused Russia of carrying out a “massacre.”