On April 2, the regional center of Bucha, 30 kilometers from Kiev, where about 37,000 people lived before the war, was again under the control of the Ukrainian military. Soon after, gruesome shots started appearing on social networks and media. According to Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk, the destroyed streets were "strewn with corpses."
Since the city's liberation, 280 people have been buried in mass graves, he told AFP. The agency's correspondent counted "at least 20 bodies on one street in Bucha, including one with his hands tied."
“16 of the 20 bodies found on one of Bucha's streets were lying on the pavement or on the side of the road. Three bodies lay in the middle of the road, and one in the yard. An open Ukrainian passport lies on the ground next to a man whose hands are tied behind his back with a white sheet. They all wore civilian clothes: winter coats, jackets or tracksuits, jeans or sneakers, sneakers or boots. Two of them were lying by the bicycle, the other next to an abandoned car. Some lie on their stomachs, with their limbs outstretched, others on their stomachs,” that's how the journalists described the city .
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A photo of the slain Bucha residents with their hands tied behind their backs was published yesterday on Twitter by an adviser to the head of the office of the Ukrainian President Mikhail Podolyak. "These people are not military people," he wrote. "They don't have weapons. They pose no threat. How many more such cases are happening now in the occupied territories?
“A large number of civilians died on the roads - young, old. You can see that people are riding bicycles, there are explosions, and they remain forever on the streets of their hometowns,” said Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Komarov, who entered Bucha with the military. According to him, entrances, playgrounds and abandoned cars can be mined in the city, now eavesdroppers are working there.
Officially, Russian authorities do not comment on allegations of killing civilians in Bucha. But on the telegram channel of the Ministry of Defense of Russia, a repost appeared from the anonymous channel “War on Fakes”, the author of which claims that shootings with the dead in the streets of Bucha were “staged”.
“They shot one in the back of the head. He fell. The women scream
International human rights organization Human Rights Watch today published stories of Ukrainians confirming reprisals against civilians in various cities in the country, including Bucha.
When the Russian military occupied Bucha
The first reports of the Russian military in Bucha appeared on February 25, on the second day of the war. There was fierce fighting in the city.
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“The enemy kept shooting at houses, cars, killing civilians and even children, robbing shops. It is impossible to send humanitarian aid: the people are surrounded by the enemy,” the Buchansk City Council wrote in early March.
On March 22, the head of the Kiev regional military administration, Alexander Pavlyuk, said that Bucha and Gostomel were under the control of the Russian army.
A local teacher told human rights activists that on March 4, the Russian military executed one person and threatened to execute four more. That morning, he heard gunshots and saw three Russian armored personnel carriers and four Kamaz vehicles speeding down his path. The woman, along with her two dogs, were hiding in the basement, she heard how they knocked down her front door, and then demanded in Russian: "Get out immediately, or we will throw a grenade."
The lady calls out that she is alone in the basement and leaves with arms raised. Outside, he meets three Russians - "two soldiers and a commander." They check his phone and then ask to go with them. On the way, the Ukrainian woman said, she saw how other soldiers were going around a neighbor's house.
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People gathered at the site in front of the warehouse rental company office. Mostly there were women, but there were also a few men over the age of 50 - about forty in total. The Russian military is interested in participants in defense.
“At some point they brought in one young man, then four more. The soldiers ordered them to [take off] their boots and jackets. They forced them to kneel on the side of the road. Russian soldiers take off their T-shirts, from behind and over their heads. They shot one in the back of the head. He fell. The women screamed. The other four men just knelt down. The commander told the others in the square: "Don't worry. You are all normal, but this is dirt. We are here to clean you of dirt," the woman recalled.
After a few hours, people began to be bred back to their homes; whenthe narrator leaves, the four men remain on their knees. On March 9, when a Human Rights Watch interviewee was able to leave Bucha, he saw that the slain man's body was still lying at the execution site.
Another local resident, Dmitry, 40, told human rights activists that he was able to escape from the shelled Bucha on March 7 - about five kilometers to the village of Vorzel in the Irpensky district, he and other refugees walked, wrapped in white sheets and waving at them. over their heads.
In the village, Dmitry, together with local residents, hid for two nights in the basement of a two-story house. There, Dmitry saw a woman with gunshot wounds to the chest and legs - according to him, the people in the basement said that the day before, Russian soldiers threw smoke bombs inside, some people panicked and ran out into the street, where they started to shoot them. A 14-year-old boy was shot in the head and a woman was injured. Dmitry recalled that he died the next day, March 8; he helped bury her near a bomb shelter.
"The barbarians tried to burn them right there on the side of the road"
Reports of civilian killings also came from other districts of the Kiev region.
The release of Irpin, a city of about 60,000 people located 40 kilometers from Kiev, was announced on March 28. At the same time, Mayor Alexander Makrushin said that, according to preliminary data, up to 300 civilians were killed in the city.
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“I'll tell you, maybe someone won't like it, but it's true. Their tanks were murdered Ukrainians, destroyed, simply tortured to the asphalt. It was scary to look at,” said Makrushin.
On March 15, the German TV channel ZDF published a video from a drone verified by journalists, which recorded Russian soldiers shooting a civilian on the E-40 highway near Kiev.
The video was recorded on March 7th. The drone spotted a Russian military vehicle a few meters from a gas station, with a V sign visible above it.
After the shooting, several cars were seen passing along the highway. Perhaps, noticing the military, they began to turn around, one car stopped. A man came out from there, he raised his hand and immediately fell down, holding his stomach. Military man in white armbands running towards him, at this time the passenger got off the car.
On April 1, the BBC managed to find out the names of the people. The driver who died was Maxim Iovenko. His wife Xenia, according to the publication, the Russian military was "shot dead in a car." The six-year-old son of the Iovenko spouse and the elderly mother of one of Maxim's friends was released by the soldiers.
The BBC's Jeremy Bowen saw Iovenko's burning car and suggested that Russia set it ablaze to cover up the killing of unarmed civilians.
On the evening of April 2, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense spoke about four or five naked female bodies found on a road 20 kilometers from Kiev. “Barbarians tried to burn them right there on the side of the road,” the agency wrote, posting a photo showing the tires covered with a brown blanket.
This image was published by photographer Mikhail Palinchak. He wrote that behind the veil were the naked bodies of one man and two or three women.
In the village of Motyzhin, Makarovsky district, Kiev region, the village head, Olga Sukhenko, her husband and son, who was kidnapped by the Russian military on March 23, were found dead yesterday .
As Ukrainian journalist Katerina Malofeeva wrote , the Ukrainian "Crimea" battalion found a cemetery with two female bodies and four male bodies; they were civilians shot in the back of the head; some people had their hands tied behind their backs. The UNIAN agency published a photo of the mass grave.
The Motyzhin Facebook group published an obituary for the Sukhenko family. “We worry about the village, try to keep in touch with everyone, help with food, support with words. They did the impossible - without a humanitarian corridor, they organized the evacuation of their fellow villagers and their families with children who had come to Motyzhin from Kyiv as a safer place. Alexander was a very brave man, who every time came back to help others, because everyone close to him became family,” that is how his fellow villagers remember the dead.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk called the killing of Olga Sukhenko a war crime.
Today, the Ukrainian edition of Babylon published a photo report of the small village of Dmitrovka in the Buchansky district. Photographs showed many burned cars and bodies lying nearby, many of them on fire.
"A few days ago, the Ukrainian army liberated the village," the newspaper wrote. "Now people"a has returned to the village. They sifted through the debris, fastened the windows and removed the bodies strewn all around. Some people died with their hands tied. This indicates that the Russian army deliberately shot the civilian population. This is genocide."
"Cleaning" of the Kiev region
On April 1, the Zvezda TV channel, which is owned by the Russian Ministry of Defense, reported that Russian paratroopers and marines in the west of the Kiev region "cleared settlements with further tasks to gain a foothold in them." According to Zvezda, "units of the airborne troops, together with the marines, managed to withstand the action of enemy forces in the direction of Gostomel-Bucha-Ozera for five days." The TV channel referred to the commander of one of the naval units, Alexei Shabulin.
“My great-grandfather lived through the entire Great Patriotic War, and until 1953 he drove a fascist evil spirit called Bandera through the Ukrainian jungle. Now that I am the glorious successor of this tradition, now my time has come. And I will not embarrass my great-grandfather and will reach the end,” said Shabulin in a video posted on the RuTube channel RuNews24 .
As the CIT research team writes, it is known that before the war, units of the Eastern Military District , as well as units of the 76th Airborne Assault Division and 98th Airborne Division , were transferred to the territory of Belarus, from where the Russian military launched an attack on Kiev . Also, CIT records , in the Kiev region they saw equipment of the Russian National Guard, and Kadyrovites were present at the airfield in Gostomel - a resident of Gostomel also told Mediazona about the military from Chechnya .
