► What happened in Boutcha?
Seized for the most part on Saturday April 2 by the first journalists to enter Boutcha after the departure of the Russian troops, the images show corpses, lying along Yablounska Avenue, in the south of this city near the capital kyiv. Civilians only, some curled up, one on the saddle of a bike that fell at the same time as him. At least twenty bodies, several of whom have their hands tied behind their backs with tape or white fabric, according to Agence France-Presse and the mayor of the city, Anatoli Fedorouk.
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These images are not the only witnesses to the abuses committed, according to the kyiv authorities, by the Russian forces who occupied the city for nearly a month: others show at least one body lodged in a manhole, and a mass grave near a church, thus revealing other corpses. The final assessment has not been established, even if the mayor of Boutcha assured AFP that he had already buried at least 280 civilian victims in mass graves. The Ukrainian authorities assure that the bodies strewing the streets of Boutcha were, for the most part, those of inhabitants of the city. But the investigation into the exact unfolding of what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described as “war crime and genocide of Russia”, during a visit to Boutcha on April 4, is just beginning.
► When did these executions take place?
This is one of the first questions posed by these images. Rather than a single massacre, the bodies discovered in Boutcha, where nearly 35,000 people lived before the war, could be the result of a series of separate abuses, committed during the weeks of occupation by the Russian army. . In a report published on April 3, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch said it was able to confirm at least one summary execution of civilians dating back to March 4: “A witness told Human Rights Watch that the soldiers (Russian) forced five men to kneel on the side of the road, pulled their t-shirts over their heads and shot one in the back of the neck,” states the report.
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A municipal worker, for his part, said that he had recovered ten bodies of people killed by a bullet in the head last month: “Apparently a sniper was ‘having fun'”, he told AFP. The American satellite imagery company Maxar also spotted traces of a mass grave dug near the Saint-André church in Boutcha on March 10, which had, as of March 31, reached 13 meters in length. . On the spot, journalists noted the presence of several partially buried corpses.
► What does Russia answer?
The Russian power denies any responsibility in a massacre which it describes as a “provocation of the kyiv regime”. Since the publication of the first images, Moscow has taken advantage of the doubts surrounding the chronology of events to unfold the story of abuses committed by Ukrainian troops who returned to the town of Boutcha at the end of March. In a message published on April 3, the Russian Foreign Ministry thus assures that its troops had left the locality by March 30, presenting the delay between the departure of the Russian forces and the first images of the bodies published on April 2 as the result of the preparation by kyiv of a macabre staging. But if the Moscow troops had indeed started to leave the area on March 30, the Ukrainian military administration for the kyiv region affirmed on the morning of April 1 that Russian soldiers were still there, prohibiting any movement and in fact delaying finding bodies.
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To support what he presents as a “staging” from “Ukrainian radicals” the Russian Foreign Ministry also claimed to find “worrying that the bodies in the images released by the kyiv regime are not stiffened after four days, have no stains typical of corpses, while the wounds contain uneaten blood (sic) ». The witnesses present in Boutcha, on the contrary, reported bodies for some already partly putrefied, despite the low temperatures of recent days, and probably abandoned for several weeks.