- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday.
- He shared findings at Izium, where bodies were found stuck under rubble and a massive cemetery.
- One of the men was castrated, “this is not the first case,” Zelensky said.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged UN member states to join their Russian counterparts on what Ukrainian officials have previously said was one of the more horrific acts of violence committed during the six-month-long invasion and recently discovered in Izium: castration.
“Please ask the Russian representative why the Russian military is so obsessed with castration,” the Ukrainian president said in an impassioned address to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday. “What has been done to them that they want to do it to others?”
In a pre-recorded speech, Zelensky called for peace, while also calling for a “package” of restrictions on Russia to punish them for their crimes during the invasion of Ukraine.
During the rally, the Ukrainian president also said that excavations were underway at the massive cemetery in Izium, which contains 445 graves, and he shared some findings of violence in the Kharkiv region.
“Bodies of men and women, children and adults, civilians and soldiers were found there,” Zelensky said.
“A family was killed under the rubble of a Russian airstrike – father, mother, girls aged six and eight, grandparents. A man was strangled with a rope. A woman had broken ribs and wounds. There was a This is not the first case of men being castrated before murder,” he said, later questioning why Russian soldiers continued to castrate people.
This is not the first time Ukrainian officials have reported violence against civilians by Russian soldiers.
In July, Ukrainian lawmaker Inna Sovsun shared what appeared to depict the castration of Ukrainian prisoners by Russian soldiers, but the identities of the victims and perpetrators were unclear.
A week later, another image surfaced online of a skull placed on a stick outside a building in the eastern Ukrainian town of Popasna, captured by the Russian military. The governor of Ukraine’s Luhansk province, Shershi Heyday, suggested that the skill belonged to a Ukrainian prisoner who was put on a stick by Russian soldiers.
