Zelensky calls on world to stop Russia, more atrocities feared

Ukraine's president showed a harrowing video of dead civilians to the UN Security Council Tuesday and called for "accountability" for apparent Russian atrocities, as fears grow that Moscow is preparing new offensives.

With global revulsion solidifying over civilian killings in the town of Bucha, President Volodymyr Zelensky likened Russia's assault to Nazi war crimes and Western nations ramped up sanctions against the Kremlin.

The United States is expected Wednesday to ban all new investment in Russia, while Britain announced it has frozen some $350 billion in assets from President Vladimir Putin's "war chest" so far.

Despite the pressure, bombardments rocked the Kyiv area villages of Velyka Dymerka and Bogdanivka, where 12 people were killed by Russian firearms and artillery, Ukraine's prosecutor general's office said on Telegram.

And new warnings emerged from Ukraine that other shattered communities, notably the town of Borodyanka, may have suffered even worse fates than Bucha.

Zelensky, in an impassioned speech by videolink from Kyiv to the 15-member Security Council, demanded stronger action as he delivered a chilling account of Putin's six-week-old war.

People "were killed in their apartments, houses... civilians were crushed by tanks while sitting in their cars in the middle of the road," Zelensky said.

"They cut off limbs, slashed their throats, women were raped and killed in front of their children."

"Accountability must be inevitable," he added, calling for Russia's exclusion from the Security Council -- on which it holds veto power.

"Are you ready to close the UN" and abandon international law, the president asked. "If your answer is no, then you need to act immediately."

Zelensky's plea follows the harrowing discovery of civilian victims in Bucha and other towns near Kyiv following Russian troop withdrawals, which he and other officials have denounced as war crimes and attempted genocide.

Europe's worst conflict in decades has killed as many as 20,000 people, according to Ukrainian estimates, and 4.25 million have fled the country.

Many in Ukraine are bracing for further Russian bombardments.

Ukrainian officials say over 400 civilian bodies have been recovered from the wider Kyiv region, many buried in mass graves.

But Zelensky said he had information of the worst atrocities in places such as Borodyanka.

"Bucha is not the worst," Ukrainian presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych said on a Russian lawyer's YouTube channel. "Everyone who managed to visit Borodyanka says that it is much, much worse."