In improvised mass graves or in the middle of the streets, corpses are everywhere in the Ukrainian town of Boutcha, northwest of kyiv, where residents continued to mourn their dead on Sunday, after the withdrawal of Russian soldiers.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian leaders should be held responsible for “murders” and “torture” in Boutcha, where the gruesome findings have sparked outrage in Europe and the United States.
Liouba, 62, leads a neighbor to a sodden trench behind a church with golden domes. But he himself does not have the strength to go and see if his brother is lying there, as the rumor has informed him.
Some 57 people are summarily buried in this mass grave, a city employee told an AFP journalist. But only a small part of them are visible.
Some are covered with body bags that have been zipped up. Others, in civilian clothes, were only partially buried; we see emerging from the earth in improbable positions here a pale hand, there a booted foot or a forehead, exposed to the snowflakes falling on the small suburban town.
A corpse is wrapped in a red and white sheet, next to a single pink woman’s sandal.
Liouba’s neighbor backs up to a stump, where he collapses. He can’t get any closer to the mass grave.
“These wounds will never heal,” fears Liouba. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, not even my worst enemy.”
– “Absolutely necessary” –
Nearby, along a narrow road framed by ruined houses, four men in a van move from body to body.
An AFP journalist counted twenty on this site alone. One of them has his legs tangled in the wheels of a bicycle, others are next to a ruined car, pierced by numerous bullet holes.
All are wearing civilian clothes. One of them has his hands tied behind his back with a strip of white cloth; his head is bathed in a scarlet puddle.
Vitalii Shreka, 27, can’t cut the tie. He resolves to untie it before lifting the corpse to place it on a body bag that his companions are closing.
They carefully inspect each body, looking for identification, before loading them into their trunk.
One of them throws an abandoned bicycle at two dogs who get too close to the corpses.
“You have to do it,” says Vladyslav Minchenko, 44, who stands in front of an abandoned body, near a bag whose contents, potatoes spoiled by humidity, are strewn on the ground.
“What we are doing is absolutely necessary.”
Serhii Kaplychnyi, a city employee, says he and his colleagues didn’t have enough arms to bury the dead during the brief period of Russian occupation.
“Many people were killed by bullets or shrapnel. But we were not allowed to bury them,” he told AFP.
“They told us to leave them there, as long as it was cold.”
The Russians eventually allowed his team to collect the bodies. “We dug a large pit using a tractor, then we buried them,” he recalls.
He now coordinates efforts to find the bodies across the city.
Soldiers give each other rough hugs, people wave small Ukrainian flags, aid convoys arrive in town.
But Serhii Kaplychnyi cannot forget the scenes of the last few weeks. He particularly remembers one day when he and his colleagues found ten people shot in the head.
“Apparently, there was a sniper who had fun,” he comments in a dull voice.
City hall employees were not the only improvised gravediggers. Residents have done their best to give temporary burial to their neighbors, in gardens or elsewhere.
“There was an old disused sewer pipe. Dead bodies were deposited there too. Now we’re going to look for them.”