INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The United States and Britain announced new sanctions against Russia Wednesday after Ukraine said hundreds of civilians were found dead
Russian oil and gas imports by year-end.Their actions followed an international outcry as Ukraine said its forces found hundreds of
civilians dead around Kyiv, including the town of Bucha, after the pullout of Russian troops."They burned families
Yesterday we found again a new family: father, mother, two children
Little, little children, two
One was a little hand, you know," Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday.In Washington, U.S
President Joe Biden joined in describing the horrors in Bucha."Civilians executed in cold blood, bodies dumped into mass graves, the sense
of brutality and inhumanity left for all the world to see, unapologetically," Biden said."There's nothing less happening than major war
crimes," he added, urging the world to hold the killers accountable.The Kremlin denies responsibility and has claimed Kyiv staged civilian
areas around Kyiv and the north is part of a shift toward Ukraine's southeast, in a bid to create a land bridge between occupied Crimea and
Moscow-backed separatist statelets in the Donbas region.Ukraine Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk on Wednesday warned residents in the
eastern Kharkiv, Lugansk and Donetsk regions to leave immediately ahead of a feared Russian attack."It has to be done now because later
people will be under fire and face the threat of death," she wrote on Telegram.The threat was already very real in the industrial city of
Severodonetsk, the easternmost city held by Ukrainian forces, where shells and rockets were landing at regular intervals on Wednesday."We
have nowhere to go, it's been like this for days," one of them, 38-year-old Volodymyr, told AFP standing opposite a burning
building.Elsewhere, preparations for the feared attack were hard under way, such as on a two-lane highway through the rolling eastern plains
connecting Kharkiv and Donetsk.Trench positions were being dug, and the road was littered with anti-tank obstacles
Nearby water reservoirs had been opened and bridges were being destroyed, all in an effort to slow any Russian advance."We're waiting for
them!" said a lieutenant tasked with reinforcing the positions, giving a thumbs up.'Leaving forever'Thousands of people have been killed and
more than 11 million displaced since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb
24.In Bucha, where Ukrainian officials blame Russian forces for carrying out a "massacre," residents were desperate to know the fate of
their loved ones.But Tetiana Ustymenko knows the conclusion to her story
said.Meanwhile efforts to evacuate civilians continued Wednesday, with a Red Cross convoy arriving in the southern city of Zaporzhzhia.It
Iryna Nikolaienko, told how she had been able to make her way out of Mariupol during a pause in the fighting."The Mariupol that I knew and
loved, it does not exist anymore," she said."I understood that I was leaving forever."EU 'indecisiveness'Western powers have already
pummeled Russia with debilitating economic sanctions, which forced Moscow on Wednesday to make foreign debt payments on dollar-denominated
bonds in rubles, raising the prospect of a potential default.Washington's new sanctions targeted Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova,
two adult daughters of Putin, plus the wife and daughter of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and members of Russia's Security Council.The
White House also declared "full blocking" sanctions on Russia's largest public and private financial institutions, Sberbank and Alfa Bank,
"sooner or later," it must also impose oil and gas sanctions.And rich countries will tap an additional 120 million barrels of oil from
emergency reserves in a bid to calm crude prices that have soared following the invasion.But addressing the Irish parliament Wednesday,
Ukraine's Zelensky condemned the "indecisiveness" of European nations dependent on Russian energy.In other moves to isolate Moscow, the U.S
and Britain have pressed to have Russia excluded from the UN Human Rights Council, with a vote in the General Assembly scheduled for
Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted there was little anyone could do about Russia's position on the UN Security Council, where it has
a veto."There's a pretty fundamental problem there," he said, a day after Zelensky called for Russia to be expelled from the
chief Jens Stoltenberg said there was no sign Putin had dropped "his ambition to control the whole of Ukraine."Spirits are high yet in Kyiv,
however, said American veteran Steven Straub, who has been training with the national guard in the capital.Straub, 73, fought during the
Vietnam war, and said Ukraine was "much different.""What surprised me here is the morale..
