US Secretary of State Antony Blinken opened his remarks at the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday recounting his recent trip to Yahidne – a Ukrainian town roughly two hours north of Kyiv that had been occupied by Russian soldiers.
“I begin here because – from the comfortable distance of this chamber – it’s really easy to lose sight of what it’s like for the Ukrainian victims of Russia’s aggression,” Blinken told his fellow diplomats seated in the room, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
“Russia’s forces … went door to door, rounding up residents at gunpoint, and marching them to the local elementary school,” where they forced more than 300 villagers – “mostly women, children, and elderly people” – into “just a few small rooms with no windows, no circulation, no running water” in the basement.
The Russian soldiers kept them imprisoned there for nearly a month, “packed together so tightly that they could barely breathe,” denying them medical care, and allowing them to remove their dead only once a day, Blinken described.
“Children, parents, husbands, and wives were forced to spend hours next to the corpses of their loved ones,” he continued.
“The oldest victim was 93 years old,” he said. “The youngest: 6 weeks old.”
The top US diplomat’s effort to highlight the horrific realities of the war in Ukraine come as the Biden administration seeks to maintain support for Kyiv amid growing opposition in Congress and as the international community faces the prospect of war with little end in sight.
On Wednesday, Blinken will join fellow national security officials including Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, CIA Director Bill Burns, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to brief the Senate on Ukraine.
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