Volodymyr Zelensky revealed horrifying details of savagery and suffering.
Warning: This article contains descriptions some readers may find distressing.
Russian troops "cut out the tongues of civilians", Ukraine's president told the United Nations on Tuesday (5 April), where he also pointed out that the savagery was being inflicted by "a member of the United Nations Security Council".
Volodymyr Zelensky told the council that Russian troops had slit the throats of non-combatants, raped and killed mothers in front of their children, and cut out tongues "because they didn’t hear what they wanted to", as he detailed atrocities carried out in Bucha, just northwest of Kyiv, which Moscow recently abandoned.
He said the invaders had killed entire families and tried to burn their bodies; gunned down people in the street and thrown bodies into wells.
Zelensky said he had recently visited Bucha and there was "not a single crime that they (Russian forces) would not commit", as he went on to compare Russia to ISIS.
"This is no different from other terrorists such as Daesh who occupy some territories, and here it is done by a member of the United Nations Security Council."
"They support hatred at the level of the state and seek to export it to other countries through their system of propaganda and political corruption."
While the world has been gripped by the horrors that have come to light in Bucha in recent days, Zelensky said the town is "only one of many examples" of where Russian troops murdered, raped, and mutilated innocents in what he said was the worst war crimes "we've seen since the end of World War Two".
"Russian troops are deliberately destroying Ukrainian cities to ashes with artillery and airstrikes, they are deliberately blocking cities, creating mass starvation," he told the council.
"They deliberately shoot columns of civilians on the road trying to escape from the hostilities.
"They even deliberately blow up shelters where civilians hide from airstrikes.
"They are deliberately creating conditions in the temporarily occupied territories so that as many civilians as possible are killed there."
Zelensky called on the UN to reform to deal with the Kremlin's aggression.
As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia has a veto with which it is able to block attempts to censure the Kremlin, something Zelensky said, "undermines the whole architecture of global security, it allows them to go unpunished so they are destroying everything that they can."
