Red Cross struggles for access to prison where Ukrainian POWs were killed in blast

KYIV, Ukraine —  The International Red Cross on Saturday asked to visit a prison in a separatist-controlled area of Ukraine where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war died in shelling a day earlier, but said its request was not immediately granted.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian and Russian officials continued to blame each other for the Friday attack on the prison.

Also Saturday, Russia kept launching attacks on several Ukrainian cities, hitting a school and a bus station.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Red Cross and the United Nations have a duty to respond to the shelling of the prison complex in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk province, and he called again for Russia to be declared a terrorist state.

“It was a deliberate Russian war crime, a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war,” Zelensky said in a video address late Friday. “There should be a clear legal recognition of Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.”

Separatist authorities and Russian officials said the attack killed 53 Ukrainian POWs and wounded 75. Russia’s Defense Ministry on Saturday issued a list naming 48 Ukrainian fighters, their ages ranging from 20 to 62, who died; it was not clear if the ministry had revised its fatality count.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has organized civilian evacuations in the war and worked to monitor the treatment of POWs held by Russia and Ukraine, said it requested access to the prison “to determine the health and condition of all the people present on-site at the time of the attack.”

“Our priority right now is making sure that the wounded receive lifesaving treatment and that the bodies of those who lost their lives are dealt with in a dignified manner,” the Red Cross said.

But the organization said late Saturday that its request to access the prison had not been granted yet.

“Granting ICRC access to POWs is an obligation of parties to conflict under the Geneva Conventions,” the Red Cross said on Twitter.

Russia, which since invading Ukraine has repeatedly made assertions that have proved false, claimed Ukraine’s military used U.S.-supplied precision rocket launchers to target the prison in Olenivka, a settlement controlled by the Moscow-backed, self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic.

The Ukrainian military accused the Russians of shelling the prison to cover up the alleged torture and execution of Ukrainians there.

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The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington, said the competing claims and limited information prevented assigning full responsibility for the attack, but the “available visual evidence appears to support the Ukrainian claim more than the Russian.”

U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said, “We stand ready to send a group of experts able to conduct an investigation, requiring the consent of the parties, and we fully support the initiatives” of the Red Cross. Russia said it has opened its own inquiry into the attack.

Elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, Russian rockets hit a school building overnight in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, and another attack occurred about an hour later, Mayor Igor Terekhov said Saturday. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

The bus station in the city of Slovyansk also was hit, according to Mayor Vadim Lyakh. Slovyansk is near the front line of fighting as Russian and separatist forces try to take full control of the Donetsk region, one of two eastern provinces that Russia has recognized as sovereign states.

In southern Ukraine, one person was killed and six injured in shelling that hit a residential area in Mykolaiv, a significant port city, the region’s administration said Saturday on Facebook.

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Friday’s attack on the prison reportedly killed Ukrainian soldiers captured in May after the fall of Mariupol, a Black Sea port city where Ukrainian troops from the Azov regiment of the National Guard held out against a months-long Russian siege.

On Saturday, an association of Azov fighters’ relatives dressed in black held a demonstration outside Kyiv’s St. Sophia Cathedral and issued a statement calling for Russia to be designated a terrorist state, alleging it has violated the Geneva Convention’s rules for the treatment of war prisoners.

A woman wearing dark glasses who gave only her first name, Iryna, was waiting for news of her 23-year-old son.

“I don`t know how is he, where is he, if he is alive or no. I don`t know. It`s a horror, only horror. For a mother, it`s the biggest loss if her child has gone,” she said.

On the energy front, Russia’s state-owned natural gas corporation said Saturday it has halted shipments to Latvia because of contract violations. Gas giant Gazprom said the shipments were stopped because Latvia violated “terms for extraction of gas.” It did not elaborate.

The statement probably referred to a refusal to meet Russia’s demand for gas payments in rubles rather than other currencies. Gazprom has previously suspended gas shipments to other European Union countries, including the Netherlands, Poland and Bulgaria, because they would not pay in rubles.

EU nations have been scrambling to secure other energy sources, concerned that Russia will cut off more gas supplies as winter approaches.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk on Saturday warned that the parts of Donetsk region that remain under Ukrainian control will face severe heating problems this winter because of the extensive destruction of gas mains in the war. She called for a mandatory evacuation of residents from the region before the cold weather sets in.