The United States on Wednesday announced sanctions targeting Russian President Vladimir Putin's two adult daughters and said it was toughening penalties against Russian banks in retaliation for "war crimes" in Ukraine.
The moves against Sberbank and Alfa Bank prohibit assets from touching the U.S. financial system and bar Americans from doing business with those institutions.
In addition to sanctions aimed at Putin's adult daughters, Mariya Putina and Katerina Tikhonova, the U.S. is targeting Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin; the wife and children of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov; and members of Russia's Security Council, including Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and prime minister.
The penalties cut all of Putin's close family members off from the U.S. financial system and freeze any assets they hold in the United States.
The European Union's executive branch, meanwhile, has proposed a ban on coal imports from Russia, which are an estimated 4 billion euros ($5.4 billion Cdn) per year. It would be the first time the 27-nation bloc has sanctioned the country's lucrative energy industry over the war.
Norway on Wednesday decided to follow other European nations as it announced it was expelling three Russian diplomats. Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt said the move comes "at a time when the whole world is shaken by reports of Russian forces abusing civilians, especially in the city of Bucha."
Nearly 200 Russian diplomatic staff have been expelled from European countries this week amid increasing outrage over the killings of civilians in Ukraine.
- AnalysisRussia's war with Ukraine made it a global pariah — but it still has friends in Mexico
Over the past few days, a global outcry has been raised over what appear to be intentional killings of civilians in Bucha and other Ukrainian towns before Russian forces withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv. The evidence led Western nations to expel scores of Moscow's diplomats and propose further sanctions.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has kept up demands for war-crimes trials for Russian troops and their leaders, while warning they were regrouping for fresh assaults on Ukraine's east and south.
Speaking by video Tuesday to the UN Security Council, Zelensky said civilians in towns around Kyiv were tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown down wells, blown up with grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while in cars.
Zelensky describes Bucha atrocities, shows graphic video in blunt UN speech
14 hours agoDuration 2:02WARNING: This video contains graphic footage | Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave a chilling account of the horrors left behind by Russian troops in Bucha to members of the United Nations Security Council as he made an impassioned plea for the Kremlin to be held accountable. 2:02
Those who carried out the killings and those who gave the orders "must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes" in front of a tribunal similar to the one established at Nuremberg after the Second World War, he said.
Moscow's UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said "not a single local person" suffered from violence while Bucha was under Russian control, and, reiterating Kremlin comments, said video footage of bodies in the streets was "a crude forgery" staged by the Ukrainians.
Evidence of killings in satellite images
The German government on Wednesday said it has information indicating bodies found after Ukraine retook Bucha last week had been lying there since at least March 10, when Russian troops were in control of the town.
Government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin that thexjmtzyw information was based on non-commercial satellite images taken March 10-18 of Yablonska Street in Bucha.
"Credible information shows that from March 7 to March 30 Russian soldiers and security forces were deployed in this area," he said. "They were also tasked with the interrogation of prisoners who were subsequently executed."
'Hunger is also a weapon,' Zelensky says
On Wednesday, Zelensky accused Russia of using hunger as a weapon of war by deliberately targeting Ukraine's essential food supplies during its nearly six-week-old invasion.
In an address to Irish legislators, he said Russian forces "are destroying things that are sustaining livelihoods" including food storage depots, blocking ports so Ukraine could not export food and "putting mines into the fields."
"For them hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us ordinary people," he said, accusing Russia of "deliberately provoking a food crisis" in Ukraine, a major global producer of staples including wheat and sunflower oil.
Journalists count dozens of corpses in Bucha
In the still largely empty streets of Bucha, officials have captured images of ruined buildings, burned military vehicles and corpses before gathering the bodies.
Survivors who hid in their homes during the occupation, many of them beyond middle age, wandered past charred tanks and jagged window panes with plastic bags of food and other humanitarian aid. Red Cross workers checked in on intact homes.
Associated Press journalists in Bucha have counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes and interviewed Ukrainians who told of witnessing atrocities.
Ukrainian refugees recount terrifying escape, soldiers take brief reprieve from war
14 hours agoDuration 2:04There’s no end to the harrowing stories of escape from the war in Ukraine, with mounting fears Russia will redeploy troops to the eastern part of the country. In areas such as Irpin, where Russian forces have left, the reprieve has allowed Ukrainian soldiers a brief opportunity to see their family members again. 2:04
The dead in Bucha included a pile of six charred bodies, as witnessed by AP journalists. It was not clear who they were or under what circumstances they died. One body was probably that of a child, said Andrii Nebytov, head of police in the Kyiv region.
Many of the dead seen by AP journalists appeared to have been shot at close range, and some had their hands bound or their flesh burned.
The AP and the PBS series have jointly verified at least 90 incidents during the war that appear to violate international law. The War Crimes Watch Ukraine project is looking into apparent targeted attacks as well as indiscriminate ones.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the images from Bucha revealed "not the random act of a rogue unit" but "a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities." He said the reports of atrocities were "more than credible."
China says the reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha are "deeply disturbing" and is calling for an investigation.
- CBC ExplainsHow Putin and Russian commanders could avoid war crime prosecutions
- AnalysisA Kremlin paper justifies erasing the Ukrainian identity, as Russia is accused of war crimes
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Wednesday that China supports all initiatives and measures "conducive to alleviating the humanitarian crisis" in the country and is "ready to continue to work together with the international community to prevent any harm to civilians."
The chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court at The Hague opened an investigation a month ago into possible war crimes in Ukraine.
- As It HappensThis Russian professor says he will keep speaking out against the war in Ukraine
- Russian troops committing worst atrocities since Second World War, Zelensky tells UN
Elsewhere in Ukraine, in Borodyanka, northwest of Kyiv, a 25-year-old, Dmitriy Yevtushkov, searched the rubble of apartment buildings and found that only a photo album remained from his family's home.
In the besieged southern city of Mykolaiv, a passerby stopped briefly to look at the bright blossoms of a shattered flower stand lying among bloodstains, the legacy of a Russian shell that killed nine people in the city's centre. The onlooker sketched the sign of the cross in the air, and moved on.
: 
The carnage and chaos of war left behind in a Ukrainian town
14 hours agoDuration 2:51WARNING: This video contains graphic footage | Uncertainty surrounds the town of Borodyanka — near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv — where residents are coping with the carnage and chaos left by Russian troops, not knowing if they’ll return. 2:51
In Andriivka, a small village about 60 kilometres west of the capital, two police officers from the nearby town of Makariv came on Tuesday to identify a man whose body was left in a field next to tracks of a Russian tank.
Capt. Alla Pustova said officers had found 20 bodies in Makariv area in the last two days, as investigators work to understand the scale of atrocities they say retreating Russian forces committed around the capital.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, meanwhile, warned that in pulling back from the capital, Russia's military is regrouping its forces in order to deploy them to eastern and southern Ukraine for a "crucial phase" of the war. "Moscow is not giving up its ambitions in Ukraine," Stoltenberg said.
While both Ukrainian and Russian representatives sent optimistic signals following their latest round of talks a week ago, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow will not accept a Ukrainian demand that a prospective peace deal include an immediate pullout of troops followed by a Ukrainian referendum on the agreement.
