Ukraine calls for investigation into prison explosion

Ukrainian authorities have gathered evidence they say showed Russia orchestrated an explosion that killed at least 50 of their soldiers.

As global outrage grew following an explosion that killed at least 50 Ukrainian prisoners held in a Russian detention camp, Ukrainian authorities on Saturday called for an international investigation while gathering evidence they say proves that Russia orchestrated what they described as a "terrorist attack".

Since the explosion Thursday night at Penal Colony No. 120, a prison camp in the Russian-occupied eastern region of Donetsk, warring parties presented diametrically opposed accounts of what happened, further escalating a war that is now entering in its sixth month.

Russian officials claimed that the Ukrainians, using US-supplied precision weapons, attacked the prison themselves, to deter defectors. Ukrainian authorities dismissed the account as absurd and said the deaths were a premeditated atrocity carried out by Russian forces from inside the prison, where survivors described being given just enough food to survive and being subjected to beatings. ritual beatings, including with chains and metal pipes.

The explosion is particularly painful for the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine because many of the dead are fought to defend Mariupol, a port on the Black Sea, then retreated to the city's Azovstal steelworks. For weeks there they withstood a Russian onslaught before finally surrendering in May.

For many Ukrainians, the siege of Azovstal has become a symbol of the country's suffering and defiance, and the soldiers who fought there, of whom around 2,500 were taken as prisoners of war, were considered heroes.

ImageDamage caused by the explosion at the Olenivka camp on Friday.Credit...Alexander Ermoshenko/Reuters

"This was a deliberate Russian war crime, a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian POWs," Mr. Zelensky said in a Friday night speech.

Mr. Zelensky said that the Red Cross, together with the United Nations, had acted "as guarantors of the life and health of our soldiers", and that they must now act. nt protect the lives of hundreds of Ukrainian prisoners of war", he said.

A series of Russian missile strikes on civilian targets, including centers commercial and apartment buildings, led the Ukrainian government to ask Washington to designate Moscow as a state sponsor of terrorism, which Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken resisted.

Josep Borrell Fontelles, the Union's top foreign policy official, said in a statement that the continuation of the "illegitimate and unjustified war of aggression" waged every day by Russia leads to " other gruesome atrocities," adding that...