US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said images of dead Ukrainian civilians found in the town of Bucha after Russian troops left were a "punch in the gut" and those responsible for any war crimes must be held accountable.
Blinken's comments in a CNN interview on Sunday came a day after Ukrainian forces moved into the town near Kyiv and found what officials and witnesses said were the bodies of nearly 300 civilians killed by Russian troops.
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"We can't help but see these images as a punch in the gut," Blinken said, before noting that President Joe Biden's administration has said it believes Russian forces have committed war crimes and that it is helping collect evidence.
"There needs to be accountability," he said. "But I think the most important thing is we can't become numb to this. We can't normalize this. This is the reality of what's going on every single day as long as Russia's brutality against Ukraine continues."
Blinken side-stepped a question of whether the United States believes Russian troops have committed genocide.
"We will look hard and document everything we see, put it together to make sure that the relevant institutions and organizations are looking at this, including the State Department," he said.
Those institutions include Ukrainian legal authorities and the International Criminal Court, which is investigating alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine.
Blinken said it was "too early to say" whether Russian troops that have withdrawn from around Kyiv are "regrouping and restocking and replenishing and then coming back" or redeploying toward the east and south, as Russian officials have suggested.
Ukraine's troops found brutalized bodies with bound hands, gunshot wounds to the head and signs of torture after Russian soldiers withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv, authorities said Sunday, sparking new calls for a war crimes investigation and sanctions against Russia.
Associated Press journalists in Bucha, a small city northwest of the capital, saw the bodies of at least nine people in civilian clothes who appeared to have been killed at close range. At least two had their hands tied behind their backs. The AP also saw two bodies wrapped in plastic, bound with tape and thrown into a ditch.
Authorities said they were documenting evidence of alleged atrocities to add to their case for prosecuting Russian officials for war crimes. To convict, International Criminal Court prosecutors will need to show a pattern of indiscriminant deadly assaults on civilians during Russia's invasion.
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said scores of residents were found slain on the streets of Bucha and the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin and Hostomel in what looked like a "scene from a horror movie."
Some people were shot in the head and had their hands bound, and some bodies showed signs of torture, Arestovych said. There also were reports of rapes, he said.
French Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian on Sunday condemned what he called the "massive abuses" committed by Russian forces" in Ukraine in recent weeks.
Le Drian highlighted the town of Bucha outside Kyiv, where Ukrainian authorities say a deliberate "massacre" was carried out by Russia. Read full story
The statement from Le Drian added that such abuses would constitute war crimes and that France will work with Ukrainian authorities and the International Criminal Court (ICC) to put on trial those responsible.
The Russian defense ministry in Moscow did not immediately reply to a request for comment when asked on Sunday about bodies found in Bucha. Moscow has previously repeatedly denied Ukrainian claims that it has targeted civilians and has rejected allegations of war crimes.
French President Emmanuel Macron said on Twitter that the images coming from Bucha were "unbearable".
"The Russian authorities will have to answer for these crimes," Macron added, expressing his compassion for the victims and his solidarity with Ukrainians.
The former chief prosecutor of United Nations war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda has called for an international arrest warrant to be issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"Putin is a war criminal," Carla Del Ponte told the Swiss newspaper Le Temps in an interview published Saturday.
In interviews given to Swiss media to mark the release of her latest book, the Swiss lawyer who oversaw UN investigations in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia said there were clear war crimes being committed in Ukraine.
She said she was particularly shocked by the use of mass graves in Russia's war on Ukraine, which recalls the worst of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.
"I hoped never to see mass graves again," she told the newspaper Blick. "These dead people have loved ones who don't even know what's become of them. That is unacceptable."
Other war crimes she identified in Ukraine included attacks on civilians, the destruction of civilian buildings and even the demolishing of entire villages.
She said the investigation in Ukraine would be easier than that in Yugoslavia because the country itself had requested an international probe. The current ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, visited Ukraine last month.
If the ICC finds proof of war crimes, she said, "you must go up the chain of command until you reach those who took the decisions."
She said it would be possible to bring even Putin to account.
"You mustn't let go, continue to the investigation. When the investigation into Slobodan Milosevic began, he was still president of Serbia. Who would have thought then that he would one day be judged? Nobody," she told Blick.
Del Ponte added that investigations should be carried out into possible war crimes committed by both sides, pointing also to reports about the alleged torture of some Russian prisoners of war by Ukrainian forces.
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