Killing of civilians in Bucha and Kyiv condemned as ‘terrible war crime’

Russia stands accused of "terrible" war crimes, as western leaders condemned the killings of unarmed civilians in Bucha and the surrounding areas of Kyiv in alleged atrocities that prompted fresh demands for tougher action against Moscow.

Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the Kremlin-ordered attack on his country amounted to genocide, after local officials reported scores of civilians had been killed in the towns of Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel near the capital.

Zelenskiy said Ukraine's refusal to be subdued to Russia was the reason "we are being destroyed and exterminated", describing the war to the US network CBS as "the torture of the whole nation".

Ukraine's foreign minister, Dymtro Kuleba, said Russia was "worse than Isis".

Witnesses of alleged atrocities in Bucha told the Guardian that Russian soldiers, who have now withdrawn from the area, had fired on men fleeing the town, and had killed civilians at will.

Shevchenko's mother, Yevdokia, 77, said she had witnessed an elderly man who had challenged a Russian soldier being shot dead as his wife stood next to him. "They shot him dead, and ordered the woman to leave," she said. The accounts could not be independently verified.

Reporters from Agence France-Presse saw at least 20 bodies, all in civilian clothing, strewn across a single street in the town of Bucha on Friday. One had his hands tied behind his back with a white cloth, and his Ukrainian passport left open beside his body. "All these people were shot," Bucha's mayor, Anatoly Fedoruk, told AFP, adding that a further 280 bodies had been buried in mass graves in the town.