Some have their eyes open against the gray sky, others their faces against the tar, all are wearing civilian clothes and each has their own posture in death. Twenty men lie on Saturday in a street in Boutcha, as noted by an AFP journalist.
The bodies, apparently men, are scattered over several hundred meters, without it being possible to immediately determine the cause of their death, but one person has a large head wound.
“All these people were shot, killed, with a bullet in the back of the head”, assures AFP Anatoly Fedoruk, the mayor of this city located northwest of kyiv, and that the Ukrainian soldiers come to recapture from the Russian forces.
One of the men has his hands tied behind his back with a piece of white cloth, an open Ukrainian passport lying on the floor next to it.
There are bodies all over the city, in front of the railway station or on this or that side of the road, but the violence that emerges from the scene of this street is systematic.
Sixteen of the twenty corpses are lying on the sidewalk or on the edge of the sidewalk. Three are in the middle of the road and another in the courtyard of a house. Another is next to an abandoned car, and two more are lying next to bicycles – one, orange gloves and a black balaclava, is lying on his side with his bicycle on him, as if he had fallen and could not not get up.
The skin on the faces presents a waxy appearance, suggesting that the corpses have been there for at least several days.
– Devastated city –
The horrors of war have become so commonplace in Boutcha that the last inhabitants pass by the bodies without even glancing at them.
In recent days, Russian forces have withdrawn from several localities near the capital after the failure of their attempt to encircle it. They are leaving the regions of kyiv and Cherniguiv, in northern Ukraine, with the aim of redeploying to the east.
Ukraine announced that Boutcha had been “liberated”, but this city was devastated by the fighting: AFP journalists could see gaping holes caused by shells in apartment buildings and numerous carcasses of cars.
Illustrating the harshness of the fighting that took place there, this street in Boutcha is littered with debris and downed power lines. Supermarkets, cafes and houses are burned or destroyed, the roof of a church is damaged. Only a McDonald’s seems to have been spared.
All the houses nearby seem deserted.
A silver-colored car is covered in bullet holes, another partially crushed, while a charred van lies near several bodies. “These are the consequences of the Russian occupation,” loose the mayor.
Butcha and the nearby town of Irpin have seen some of the fiercest fighting since Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, when Russian soldiers tried to surround kyiv.
These two once verdant cities resisted, but the price paid was terribly high and most of the inhabitants fled the relentless bombardments and rocket attacks.
– “Still very scared” –
Ukrainian forces were only able to fully penetrate Boutcha a day or two ago, which had been inaccessible for almost a month and deprived of all assistance.
They began their first deliveries of basic necessities on Saturday, responding to the emergency, and the dead must remain unburied for some time yet.
Ukrainian soldiers distribute food and medicine to residents from the back of a green military truck. A body lies under a sheet, only a hundred meters away.
Residents of Boutcha are “still very scared, still shocked”, observes Yuriy Biriukov, a member of Ukraine’s volunteer territorial defense team overseeing the aid operation.
“Ordinary civilians can’t even imagine the conditions they lived in for that month, with artillery, no supplies, no way out,” he adds.
A resident showed AFP what he described as a grave, topped with a green wooden cross, in the back garden of a house, where four people including a child were buried.
The people who stayed in Boutcha are mostly elderly. A group of seniors is also gathered at an open-air soup kitchen, around a makeshift stove, next to a yellow Lada car with flat tires.
They say Russian soldiers broke into the top floor apartments of their Soviet-era building, stole items and asked an elderly woman if she had any weapons.
They also say they counted more than 70 Russian armored vehicles on Tuesday leaving the city in the opposite direction from kyiv. And the shelling stopped on Thursday.
“If there is peace, everything will be wonderful,” Nadia Protopopova, 82, wants to believe.