Ukrainian citizens told 60 Minutes on Sunday about the “unimaginable” war crimes they have endured during the three years since Russia attacked their country, including the kidnapping of children and the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in small towns and villages.
Correspondent Scott Pelley reported Ukrainian prosecutors have documented more than 178,000 war crimes that are being investigated.
“They’re killing civilians,” Natalia Tenytska told the program. “It’s elimination of the Ukrainian nation. They’re just wiping our cities off the face of the Earth.”
Tenytska is a survivor of the Palm Sunday strike by Russian forces in Sumy, Ukraine earlier this year, where more than 30 Ukrainians were killed on the holy day. CBS showed footage of civilians walking the streets and who were in church who were suddenly rocked when a warhead traveling at 2,000 miles per hour hit the city.
Beth Van Schaack, who served as the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice for three years during President Joe Biden’s administration, said Russia is routinely attacking towns with “no discernible military objectives.”
Those attacks, she continued, “seem to be calculated to make as much destruction as possible and to terrorize the civilian population.”
Pelley told viewers that, of all the war crimes alleged against Russia, dictator Vladimir Putin only faces one arrest warrant: for his campaign to abduct Ukrainian children.
“They’re being kidnapped. They’re being subjected to Russification, to military training,” Van Schaack said. “They’re forced to deny their Ukrainian roots. And ultimately, they’re often put up for adoption or placed in foster homes in Russia.”
The goal, she said, is to undermine Ukraine’s status as an independent country raise the children as Russians and have them “deny their own cultural heritage.”
The 60 Minutes report comes as President Donald Trump has been urging Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky to accept a peace deal by Thanksgiving.
He told reporters on Saturday that Zelensky, if he does not accept the deal, can “fight his little heart out.” But when asked by reporters in front of the White house if was his “final offer,” the president said, “No, we’d like to get to peace.”
Watch part of the 60 Minutes report above.
The post ‘They’re Killing Civilians’: Ukrainians Describe Carnage of Russian War Crimes on ’60 Minutes’ first appeared on Mediaite.
