Behind the building with pink tiles and the cement bag barricades erected by the Russian soldiers, men are stretched out, silent under the snow. One of them has his hands tied behind his back with the laces of military shoes; another has his wrists tied with tape. A third has his ankles bound with an electric cable, an empty Russian ration box by his side. Their shoes are gone.
Inside the trash-strewn building in which the soldiers had set up camp, a black puppy sits on a sofa, oblivious to the horrors of war. Why were these eight men, all dressed in civilian clothes and shot in the head and chest, killed? An additional enigma for the police and the investigators who have just arrived in Boutcha, since the Ukrainian soldiers took over the city from the Russians.
The city has no shortage of such mysteries. When the Ukrainian soldiers arrived in the city, their vehicles were forced to weave between the bodies of civilians abandoned in the streets. Yesterday [samedi 2 avril] the bodies were moved, installed in body bags or sometimes without shrouds and deposited at the bottom of a common grave in the shade of the golden domes of the Saint-André church. According to the authorities, this grave contains 280 dead and there are still more. The men killed all had their hands tied behind their backs. It is suspected that the Russian invaders, seized with paranoia, believed that they were helping the Ukrainian army.
As the Ukrainian military scours the ruined buildings for unexploded shells, a long list of horrors – evidence of widespread war crimes – is building up; a grim indicator of what remains to be discovered in cities large and small, besieged or under Russian control. Butcha was one of the first targets of the offensive against the Ukrainian capital. The Kremlin then halted this operation last week to focus on southern and eastern Ukraine. The Russians arrived so quickly that many locals, especially the elderly, did not have time to flee and often did not expect such terrible events. “They arrived with a column of tanks, it was like the return of the Second World War”, says Svetlana Klyumtchyk, a 46-year-old stay-at-home mom. “They were young people and they left us alone at first. Then they started knocking on doors asking us: ‘Where are the Nazis?’”
“They wanted to see if I had Nazi or Nationalist tattoos”
The first wave of Russians invaded commercial buildings as well as abandoned apartments and houses. But as the Ukrainian counter-offensive gained momentum, the occupiers began to grow feverish and turned on civilians, fearful that the latter would pass intelligence to the Ukrainian military on Russian positions. “They captured me, interrogated me and tortured me”, says Volodymyr Ivanov, 40, a sports equipment salesman who queues for food distribution. His hands are still shaking and he’s obviously been drinking vodka. “They stripped me naked to see if I had Nazi or nationalist tattoos; they found nothing.”
The men holed up in their homes and the women went to fetch water or ask permission to light fires to cook in the absence of gas and electricity. Tetyana Zabarylo, 40, was beaten with the butt of a Kalashnikov by soldiers who stole her phone. She tries in vain to hide her bruised eye under the make-up. “Tell NATO that we thank them for not having closed the sky”, she says bitterly, referring to repeated requests from Ukraine to establish a no-fly zone.
Yesterday afternoon, police and soldiers cautiously ventured into a holiday resort, where children could once enjoy the forest and practice sports all summer long. Mattresses had been ripped off and used to barricade windows, while others lay on the floor on which the soldiers slept. In a cellar under a dormitory, the Ukrainians made another grisly discovery – the corpses of five men executed at point-blank range. A team of deminers examined the bodies to verify that they had not been booby-trapped. According to the police, they are maintenance workers, captured when the camp was set up and killed before the Russians withdrew.
The great offensive launched by Moscow on kyiv ended in a strategic fiasco. The Russian army showed a total incomprehension of the Ukrainian mentality, and experienced staggering logistical dysfunctions. In addition, Soviet-made armor clashed with technologically advanced Western weapons supplied by Britain and the United States. On a small road between kyiv and Irpine, several of them came under fire from anti-tank missiles directed at them by the Ukrainians.
The shriveled, charred corpse of a tank commander is visible inside the vehicle, whose turret has been thrown to the side. Ukrainian officers, who have come to join their comrades in Boutcha, stop their cars and happily take selfies.
The town of Boutcha is located northwest of kyiv, just after Irpin. The latter was the scene of heavy shelling and fighting, as Russian troops struggled to advance towards the capital after Ukrainian soldiers blew up the bridge over the Irpine River to stop them. Last week President Zelensky hailed Irpin as the first “hero city” of the invasion, once it was taken back from the Russians by the Ukrainians. Yesterday [dimanche 3 avril]after the discovery of new horrors in Boutcha, Zelensky raised his voice, accusing President Putin of genocide.
The Kremlin denies any involvement
Butcha’s litany of horrors is repeated in other newly liberated localities around kyiv. According to certain testimonies, mothers were raped in front of their children, families on the run were murdered in their cars, men of fighting age were executed. The Russian Defense Ministry denies any involvement in the Boutcha atrocities. He claims that the photos and videos of these scenes are “a new staging of the kyiv regime for the Western media, as was the case with the maternity hospital in Mariupol and in other cities”.
In particular, the Ministry considers it suspicious that the bodies in these sequences have not become rigid, that they do not show the discoloration of the skin typical of that of corpses and that “uncoagulated blood [apparaisse] in wounds”. He also maintains that the Russian forces left the area on March 30, adding that Anatoly Fedorouk, the mayor, had confirmed the departure of the Russians in a video of March 31, without mentioning the slightest execution.
“For this reason, it is no wonder that alleged evidence of Boutcha’s crimes did not surface until four days after SBU officers arrived. [service de renseignement ukrainien] and members of Ukrainian television, continues the ministry. Not a single resident was attacked while the city was under the control of the Russian armed forces.”
In Irpin, 43-year-old Mikhail Khyshchynsky returned home to find the damage left by the Russians after his home was ransacked. His white Volvo, requisitioned by Russian soldiers, was brought back to him by neighbors who remained there. One V black, the signature of Russian forces attacking kyiv, was spray-painted on the body.
“I came here from kyiv to lead a quiet life, he says. All this is really a shock.” His garden was littered with empty wine and liquor bottles, and inside the house all the drawers had been turned over. “They drank to the last drop of alcohol in every house, he assures. Maybe 1,000 bottles of whiskey and vodka in this neighborhood. Jewelry, computers, cash – everything is gone.”
“The Russian soldiers were deeply exhausted”
Stanislav Polukhin, 34, commander of a special police battalion, is equally sickened by what he discovered in the abandoned Russian cantonments of Boutcha. “They slept among this waste; they are disgusting”, he is indignant. As for the Russian projects, “They want to refocus on other regions, if I understood correctly. They haven’t had much success around here”.
Much has been made of the low morale of the Russian troops and the fact that their commanders had not been up to the job: not content with poorly planning operations, they rarely tried to recover the bodies of their fallen soldiers. We do not want to feel sorry for them after the atrocities they committed in Boutcha. Let’s just hope that their defeat will be bitter. “The civilians told us that the retreating Russian soldiers were deeply exhausted, emphasizes Polukhin. They have spent a lot of time here without enough food and they can’t take it anymore.”