Two soldiers inspect a devastated area after the Russian withdrawal in Bucha, near kyiv. /
The survivors come out of the cellars after six weeks in which they have subsisted between explosions and gunshots
Oleg was 33 years old and was a cook in a restaurant in kyiv. Married and the father of a 4-year-old girl, ever since the Russians arrived in Bucha he had lived locked up in the basement of his house on Yablunska Street with forty neighbors. On the afternoon of March 19, he went out to get firewood to make a fire and heat the basement. He knew that it was a risky exit because the Russians did not allow any movement. He never came back. Yaroslav, one of his neighbors, remembers that «it was in the afternoon and the Russians stopped them. Oleg responded to the cry of ‘I am a civilian, I am a civilian’, but they ignored him and we heard five shots. His body appeared ten days later, “handcuffed and with his stomach burst open by bullets. I was the one who turned the body over, which was face down. He had already been dead for days when they left him here. It is urgent that someone investigate these crimes », he asks sadly under the plaque of block 318-A of the street, just 30 steps from the bunker.
Oleg is one of the dozens of fallen on this street renamed the ‘avenue of bodies’ in the Sklovazod neighborhood of Bucha, a working-class area born during the years of the USSR in the vicinity of the local glass factory, which he visited yesterday President Volodymyr Zelensky. «The Russians have behaved like beasts and I am sorry that in Moscow they are deceived with this war, that they do not know the truth. Denazify? All these dead are only civilians, there are no followers of Stepán Bandera here », laments Lasia, who walks among the charred shells with her husband, Mikhail.
Russia says that everything is a “setup” of kyiv, but on this street no one has had time for that. The survivors come out of the cellars after six weeks in which they have lived between explosions, gunfire and under the terror of occupation forces wounded by the great ambush they suffered in Bucha on their way to kyiv on the third day of the war, which continued yesterday with another attack that left 7 dead –including three minors– and 34 wounded after a bombing in Kharkov.
Oleg’s family doesn’t want to talk. On his behalf is done by a close friend, Luda. She remembers him as “a good and quiet man” and she crosses herself as she approaches the blood mark left by his corpse. “Nobody was allowed to walk down the street and at night they forbade us to make fire, they feared that the flames would serve to attract the attention of some Ukrainian sniper. They came to shoot a man for lighting a cigarette, “says the family friend.
Luda goes with an acquaintance to the neighborhood supermarket. The place is destroyed by bombs, so they enter through what were glass doors and in an apocalyptic interior they remove from the shelves what can be saved from the disaster. On the way there and back they must be careful because there is a mined area.
Common pit
Bucha’s main mass grave was dug by the Russians at the rear of St. Andrew’s Church. Father Andrei says that he saw them start the excavation on March 10 and calculates that there may be more than sixty bodies. Some of the corpses collected since Friday, the day of the Russian withdrawal, have also been brought to this place where the purple hands and feet of those who have been dead for longer protrude from the mud. The newly arrived bodies are piled on top of them, stuffed into black plastic bags.
«The Russians brought dead people every day in a white van and in the children’s train that used to be in the town park. They arrived, unloaded and left,” says Alek, who has remained in Bucha for six weeks. “I looked at the scene in astonishment and did not ask myself many questions because my priority was to survive, but now that I can go out on the street and see it so closely, I am in shock,” he comments in front of a tomb with a wooden cross with the names of Margarita, Matvei and Klim, deceased on March 5.
It is only a few meters from the mass grave and Alek himself buried the bodies of this mother and her two children, shot dead by a Russian checkpoint when they tried to change their neighborhood in Bucha to be with their grandmother. «It was a family of displaced people from Donbas, pure Russians, the typical Russian family. They had been with us for two years and we loved them very much. It took me 22 days to be able to go and remove their bodies from the car. The father has lost his leg, but he was saved and is recovering in hospital », recalls Alek. He dug a hole for the three of them and covered the grave with cobblestones. The improvised burial was on the 28th, just one day after Margarita’s birthday and when the Russians were finalizing the preparations for her withdrawal. With her departure, Bucha’s dead and survivors regain peace.