The bodies no longer lie in the street like old clothes battered by the wind, but the silence is so thick that it shrinks the soul. Children don’t scream and old people crawl with glazed eyes. They are all stunned, unable to believe what has happened in this big town of simple people to the west of kyiv, where the neighbors plant flowers and cabbages on their plots of land and the dogs don’t bite. For almost a month, the russian tanks they parked in their gardens and the courtyards of their apartment blocks. “We come for Zelinsky and for kyiv. We do not want to occupy Ukraine or do anything to them civilians&rdquor ;, Maxim assures that the soldiers stationed in his neighborhood told him. But very soon those promises evaporated and Bucha became the macabre scenario of one carnage against the civilian population. The largest to date war in Ukraine.
The large massacres in war contexts they are rarely free. it kills “an inferior race & rdquor ;, they kill the “traitors of the country & rdquor; or kill them “infidels” of the religion of the day. The crueler the knife, the more the enemy has been dehumanized. And, in Bucha, the russian soldiers they were not looking for people, but for Nazis and fascists & rdquor ;, According to the repeated testimony of the survivorsthe narrative that has propagated Vladimir Putinwho sent his troops to Ukraine with the confessed intention to “denazify” the countrya country that has nothing less than a jew as president.
“I told them that there were no Nazis here & rdquor ;, says Abramova Iryna, a 48-year-old woman in front of the ruins of her house. “They told me that it is our fault to have a government like this and that they had to kill us all. My house was burning, they had set it on fire & rdquor ;. act followed They took her husband out into the garden. They brought him to his knees. They took off his shirt and they shot him in the neck In front of her. “I told them to kill me too because my husband is the only thing he had. The soldier pointed at my head three times and then told me that they don’t kill women & rdquor ;, she says now before bursting into tears.
The torment in Bucha had started the February 27, when dozens of tanks from the Kremlin they entered the city. They didn’t stay too long because a ukrainian drone attack forced them back, turning their streets into one big heavy weapons graveyard. But it was not the last Russian word. Days later, his forces managed to displace the Ukrainian army to Irpin, converted since then into the battle front, and they went on to occupy Bucha from March 3. “During the first two weeks the most of the soldiers were young people and they treated us decently & rdquor ;, recalls Tatiana, a housewife in her fifties. But then they started coming older military very well equipped and fThat’s when the massacre began & rdquor;. The rumor in town is that they were from FSBthe security agency successor to the KGB.
From occupation to massacre
From the beginning it phones confiscated and people were questioned while the troops went on a rampage, according to neighbors. Theoretically, they were looking for “Nazis”, far-rightists of the Right Sectorveterans of the donbas war and to any Ukrainian with the slightest hint of being a nationalist. Some people disappeared. Others were tortured. AND hundreds of civilians began to fall because as everyone repeats in Bucha there was not a single Ukrainian soldier left. executed with a shot to the headshot down by snipers or shot in front of a wall.
“I personally saw how they killed ten people, usually in the morning, when people went to get firewood or water & rdquor ;, says Maxim, a 34-year-old web designer. “Usually executed with a shot to the headalthough I also saw a neighbor who was on the phone when she was killed by a sniper”. Maxim says the terror has been hard to bear. 56 people were trapped in their apartment block unable to flee the city. And he knows it so exactly because the occupying soldiers demanded a list with names and details of all the people in the block.
Many of them, especially the men, who were prohibited from fetching water or chopping wood, spent a good part of their days shut up in their apartments or in the cellars of their blocks, authentic dirty, dark, wet and icy burrows. “We didn’t know what they wanted to do with us and also we were without water without food or without heating. We only trusted that God would save us & rdquor ;, he says now. The artillery blasts they rarely stopped, at most a couple of hours at night, according to neighbors. “A woman died in the shelter. Her husband came out crying: ‘my wife is dead’. It might have frozen because here, even in March, it can be up to 15 degrees below zero & rdquor ;, adds Maxim.
drunk soldiers
Related news
Along with the snipers, the wildest soldiers they would have been the ones who got drunk with the looting of shops and houses. “There are rumors in this area that they took some young girls, they raped and killed them. The last days before they left, they simply dedicated themselves to killing the local people. The snipers, but also soldiers getting drunk and they went down the street shooting & rdquor ;, says Sergei, a 57-year-old pensioner.
The slaughter was such –410 deaths have been counted so far by the Ukrainian authorities—that the last few days the bodies were one after the other in the streets, as documented by the first photographers who entered the city after the Russian withdrawal on March 31. “To walk down the street, when going out for water, you had to jump over the corpses”, affirms Tatiana with terror still tattooed on her face.