Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged members of the United Nations to confront their Russian counterparts over one of the most horrific acts of violence that Ukrainian officials previously said were committed during the seven-month invasion and was recently discovered in Izium: castration. “Please ask the representatives of Russia why the Russian army is so obsessed with castration,” the Ukrainian president said in an impassioned speech to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday. “What happened to them to want to do this to others?” In the pre-recorded speech, Zelensky called for peace while also demanding a “full package” of sanctions against Russia to punish it for crimes he said were committed during the invasion of Ukraine. As the assembly was underway, the Ukrainian president also said the excavation of the Izium mass grave site, which contained 445 graves, was underway and shared some of the violent findings in the Kharkiv region. “The bodies of women and men, children and adults, civilians and soldiers were found there,” Zelensky said. “There is a family that died under the rubble of a house from a Russian airstrike — father, mother, six- and eight-year-old girls, grandparents. There is a man who was strangled with a rope. There is a woman with broken ribs and wounds on her body. There is a man who was castrated before the murder, and this is not the first case,” he said, later wondering why Russian soldiers continue to castrate people. It was not the first time a Ukrainian official reported violent actions committed by Russian soldiers against civilians. In July, Ukrainian MP Inna Sovsun shared what appeared to depict the castration of a Ukrainian captive by Russian soldiers, although the identities of the victim and perpetrators were unclear. Another image appeared online a week later, of a skull mounted on a stick outside a building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Popashna, which was taken over by the Russian military. Serhiy Haidai, governor of Ukraine’s Luhansk province, suggested the skill belonged to a Ukrainian prisoner and was placed on a stick by Russian soldiers.
