Standing on an esplanade in which hardly anything remains, on Yablunska de Bucha street, Lyudmila Kizilov points out different points of what was her home. The woman descends the stairs of the deep basement where she took refuge with her husband during the first days of Russian occupation in the symbolic city. And she bursts into tears: “Valery, why? Why did I let you up?”
Getting ahead in Bucha a year after the Russian occupation: “I try to forget, but I can’t”
Further
There was no signal in the basement and Valery Kizilov, her husband, needed to make a call. The man went up and she waited for him underground. Five minutes later, Lyudmila heard a shot.
He had been listening to them for days and did not give it much importance. Until the screaming started. “Someone approached the basement. In Russian, he would say: ‘Who is in the basement, get out of there.’ He spoke in a very aggressive way. ‘Get out of the basement or we’ll put a grenade in, we’ll kill you,’” Lyudmila recalls. She went outside and found an armed Russian soldier. “I told him that there was no one else inside and asked about my husband. Why he hadn’t come back. Why he hadn’t come for a long time, but he didn’t answer me. He just told me to go back to the basement and forbade me to get out of there ”.
Terrified, she descended the stairs until she returned to the darkness of the basement. Lyudmila trembled. She felt that something had happened, but she put it out of her mind. “Maybe they’re questioning him,” she told herself. She was very worried, she thought that something was happening, that she couldn’t get out, that the Russians were in town, she remembered that shot that she was trying to minimize. She spent hours alone, anguished between thoughts of her. Her until nightfall. She until she couldn’t take it anymore and she decided to go looking for her husband.
He picked up the flashlight and, aware of the risk, headed up the stairs. She knew where her husband used to go out to talk on the phone and she began to go there, crawling on the floor. I was afraid to get up. She moved carefully under the windows, she says. She verified that the fence of her house was broken. “I kept looking. The house has two exits, and when I approached the other, I found my husband. He was dead. His body was lying on the ground. He was shot in the head, ”says Lyudmila, on the sofa in her son’s house, where he currently lives.
“It was night. Total silence. And I was there, in front of the husband, who was lying down. There was a lot of blood and I was next to him, alone”, recalls the woman, broken in tears. She spent the whole night there, paralyzed, next to the corpse of her husband. “I put his hands in a good position, I covered his blood with sand. I stayed with him, touching her head, caressing her and asking her forgiveness for not preventing her from leaving the basement ”.
The murder of Valery Kizilov is one of the cases investigated by the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine as possible war crimes. The Ukrainian government estimates that 637 civilians died in Bucha during the Russian occupation. 1,400 died in the surrounding area. “Ukraine will use its national judicial system to hold accountable” the majority of Russian murderers and terrorists, “said Volodymyr Zelensky last Friday at an event commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of the city. The president recalled that the country is relying on the International Criminal Court to seek Justice.
A base in front of the house
On March 5, 2022, Russian soldiers forced Lyudmila to walk to the house of her neighbor, Vitaly Zivotovski, which has been converted into a base for Russian troops, according to her account, which coincides with the information published by the New York Times with images. of the security cameras that place Zivotovski’s house as a key point of the Russian troops during the first days of occupation in Bucha.
“They released me in the basement in a brutal way. They leave me there with the neighbor and his daughter. The Russians occupied the entire house and there was a command point. In the big room they made the hospital. The house was surrounded by military vehicles…”, recalls Lyudmila. From the basement, where she stayed until March 9, she listened to orders thrown by the Russian soldiers. Two of them were nicknamed Flakon and Uran, she indicates, coinciding with the recordings that the NYT accessed.
Evacuation
On March 8, her daughter, who lived in another part of Bucha, went to look for her mother. “I didn’t know what was happening, where I was. She already knew that her father had died, but she had not been able to contact me for a long time, ”explains Lyudmila. Her daughter had plans to evacuate with her family but she wouldn’t do it without her mother, so she made her way through the town despite the Russian occupation. She “She passed by all the dead people, who were in the streets, to go look for me. There were many Russian checkpoints and it was very dangerous. She was wearing a white sheet on her back.
He arrived at Vitaly’s house and asked for his mother. The Russians told him that she was in the basement. “When I went out and saw her, I went back into a state of shock, I felt a lot of panic again when I saw that my daughter had come here. I was afraid that they would shoot her too, that she would put herself in danger by coming to that area, which was full of Russian soldiers ”.
The daughter asked the Russians if they would allow her to take her mother. They said yes. But Lyudmila saw that the body of her husband was still lying in the same place where she had last seen it. The Russians offered to bury her body and she accepted. “I gave the shovel to the Russians and showed them the place where they could bury him. They dug a hole. I gave them a red blanket, they wrapped him in it and buried him in the patio of her house.
After collecting some clothes at home, he fled to another, quieter area of Bucha. They wanted to travel to kyiv the next day. “They let us out through a secondary street, because the one that is usually used was full of dead people…”. They managed to reach the Ukrainian capital.
In early April 2022, the Russian troops fell back and the Ukrainian army recaptured Bucha. But then Lyudmila was still afraid to return home. She avoided doing so until April 22, when she was sent a photo showing her husband’s body exhumed in the patio of her house. “I didn’t understand who did it and I went back,” says the woman, who later understood the process undertaken by the Ukrainian authorities to identify the bodies and investigate war crimes. “Just that day, upon my arrival, they had sent a car with several bodies. They gave us the addresses of several morgues and we found him. He was still wrapped in the same red blanket.
After the identification, on April 27, Valery’s body was recovered, and the family was able to celebrate the official burial, in the Bucha cemetery. A little less than eleven months later, Lyudmila visits the grave of her husband. She doesn’t have a tombstone yet. On a mountain of sand, she stands a wooden cross, with a photo of Valery Kizilov. “Sorry, I haven’t brought you anything,” she says in front of the grave. The woman caresses the image of her husband and breaks down crying.
Valery died at the age of 69. He worked almost all of his life as a freelancer in Bucha, where he ran a cafeteria and a grocery store. “He was very active, handsome, strong, in good health, a smart man, with studies,” describes his wife, with a smile wet with tears. She shows her passport photo and searches her cell phone for one of the two of them together, captured one of those random days that she now remembers as extraordinary.