Boris Johnson says Russia's Kharkiv attack is 'absolutely sickening'

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said the scenes in Kharkiv were “absolutely sickening” and compared the situation to some of the attacks on Sarajevo in the Bosnian war. “It has that feel to me of an atrocity committed deliberately against a civilian centre,” he said at Tapa military base in Estonia.

Boris Johnson also played down the prospect of Russia being thrown off the UN Security Council because the rules could not be changed without Moscow’s agreement due to its veto.

But he added: “What is happening is that the great middle of the UN congregation is starting to realise quite how horrific this is. “With every day that goes by, as they watch the heroism of the Ukrainian resistance and they see what’s happening in Ukraine and they see episodes like the missile in Kharkiv and the destruction of civilian populations, I think people’s stomachs are being turned by what is happening. “They are seeing that it is necessary to stand up against Russian aggression, to support the Ukrainians and to endorse our strategy which is that President Putin must not be allowed to succeed, he must fail in Ukraine.”

"What's happening in Kharkiv, it's absolutely sickening, and it reminds me if anything (of) the shelling of Sarajevo market, the shelling of innocent people in Bosnia," Johnson told journalists during a visit to a NATO base in Tallinn.

Boris Johnson said that Russia's bombardment of Ukraine's second city Kharkiv was reminiscent of massacres of civilians in Sarajevo in the 1990s.

Two shillings of a marketplace during the siege of Sarajevo in 1994 killed over 100 civilians, one of the bloodiest days in the Bosnian War following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. 

Moscow on Tuesday intensified its six-day offensive against Ukraine, killing at least 18 civilians with missiles and artillery strikes in Kharkiv alone.