The 193-member UN General Assembly will vote on Thursday on a US push to suspend Russia from the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council, diplomats said Wednesday.
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A two-thirds majority of voting General Assembly members in New York can suspend a country for committing gross and systematic violations of human rights. Russia is in its second year of a three-year term on the 47-member Human Rights Council.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused the Russians of gruesome atrocities in Ukraine and told the UN Security Council that those responsible should immediately be brought up on war crimes charges in front of a tribunal like the one established at Nuremberg after World War II.
Over the past few days, grisly images of what appeared to be intentional killings of civilians carried out by Russian forces in Bucha and other towns before they withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv have caused a global outcry and led Western nations to expel scores of Moscow's diplomats and propose further sanctions, including a ban on coal imports from Russia.
Zelenskyy, speaking via video from Ukraine to UN diplomats, said that civilians had been tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown down wells, blown up with grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while in cars.
"They cut off limbs, cut their throats. Women were raped and killed in front of their children," he said. He asserted that people's tongues were pulled out "only because their aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear from them."
Zelenskyy said that both those who carried out the killings and those who gave the orders "must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes" in front of a tribunal similar to what was used in postwar Germany.
Moscow's UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said that while Bucha was under Russian control, "not a single local person has suffered from any violent action." Reiterating what the Kremlin has contended for days, he said that video footage of bodies in the streets was "a crude forgery" staged by the Ukrainians.
"You only saw what they showed you," he said. "The only ones who would fall for this are Western dilettantes."
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