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immediately.

“It looks exactly like war crimes,” President Volodymyr Zelensky’s spokesman told BBC television.

“We found mass graves. We found people with their hands and with their legs tied up... and with shots, bullet holes, in the back of their head. They were clearly civilians and they were executed.”

UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss called for “indiscriminate” Russian attacks in Bucha and elsewhere to “be investigated as war crimes”.

In Brussels, European Council chief Charles Michel said the EU was helping Ukraine and NGOs gather evidence “for pursuit in international courts”.

And Germany’s vice chancellor and economy minister Robert Habeck said a “terrible war crime” had been carried out in Bucha and called for fresh EU sanctions against Russia.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has already opened a probe into possible war crimes committed in Ukraine.

Several Western leaders, including US President Joe Biden, have accused Russia’s Vladimir Putin of being a “war criminal”.

Human Rights Watch said it had documented cases of Russian troops committing possible war crimes against civilians in occupied areas of Chernigiv, Kharkiv, and Kyiv, including rape and summary execution.