ONE THEY COULD SAVE... AND THE HUNDREDS THEY COULDN'T
Civilian bodies in streets, mass graves
Ukrainian authorities continued to gather the dead Wednesday after the apparent slaughter of civilians in Kyiv’s northern suburbs following Russian troops’ withdrawal from the capital.
Investigators collected bodies, several with their hands still bound and many with close-range gunshot wounds or severe burns, throughout Bucha, where the dead have been found in mass graves and strewn across streets.
Photos from Bucha on Wednesday showed dozens of body bags in a local cemetery as police began to identify the victims before sending them to area morgues.
Dead civilians, wearing jeans, winter coats and sneakers, could be seen through the open zippers of a handful of body bags as police went about their work.
More than 60 bodies have been collected in Bucha over the past day, according to reports.
Authorities in Makariv, 40 miles to the west, said they’d found 20 bodies in and around the town.
Rescue workers in Borodyanka, where Ukrainian citizens reportedly held off a Russian advance last month, said they were looking for bodies in the rubble of destroyed apartment buildings.
Desperate measures
A heartbreaking image went viral from Sasha Makoviy, a Kyiv mother who was so terrified that she’d be killed while trying to save her toddler that she wrote a list of family numbers on the child’s back.
“Ukrainian mothers are writing their family contacts on the bodies of their children in case they get killed and the child survives,” Kyiv Independent journalist Anastasiia Lapatina wrote.
The developments come as:
• Russia accused Ukraine of firing mortars on its border guards near Belgorod, a Russian city some 25 miles from the Ukrainian border. The cross-border attack comes a week after Russia accused Ukrainian helicopter gunships of striking a fuel depot in Belgorod. Ukrainian officials have denied both attacks.
• Slovakia’s Prime Minister Eduard Heger says he will join EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to travel to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later this week. Heger said Wednesday, “Tomorrow in the evening, I will travel to Kyiv.” He declined to give further details about the trip. Von der Leyen has planned to travel to Kyiv with EU foreignpolicy chief Josep Borrell.
• The US Justice Department is working with European allies and prosecutors in Ukraine to investigate potential war crimes. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that US prosecutors are working to gather evidence and “collect the information on atrocities that we have all seen in both photographs and video footage.”
• A Russian missile struck at a pediatric hospital in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, with chilling images showing children’s toys near the scene of the attack.
• Russian authorities have begun using mobile crematoriums in the besieged city of Mariupol in order to hide evidence of mur
dered civilians, the city’s mayor alleges. “After widespread international coverage of the genocide in Bucha, the top Russian leadership issued an order to destroy any evidence of the crimes of their army in Mariupol,” Mayor Vadym Boichenko said.
Brutal footage
In light of the gruesome trail left behind by retreating Russian troops in the north, Ukrainian officials urged civilians to evacuate from the east, where Kremlin forces are expected to advance.
Officials in Sloviansk, a city in the Donetsk Oblast to the east, said Wednesday that local bank branches were shutting down, as were postal and pension operations.
Authorities in the eastern Luhansk Oblast also urged civilians to evacuate westward, as Russian shelling struck high-rise buildings in the city of Severodonetsk.
Grisly video footage emerged Wednesday showing Ukrainian forces shooting and killing a wounded Russian soldier on a road west of Kyiv. The footage, verified by The New York Times, shows two bodies, apparently Russian soldiers, lying on the road in a pool of bright red blood.
The closest soldier, whose jacket is pulled up above his head, can be seen twitching and is heard struggling to breathe.
“He’s still alive,” a man’s voice says. “Film these marauders. Look, he’s still alive. He’s gasping.”
A man raises his rifle and fires two shots into the gasping man’s torso. The wounded Russian gasps again and is shot a third time in the back before he stops moving.
The Ukrainian unit is not identified in the video, but the scene depicted and the Ukrainian soldiers seen in the footage appear identical to those in a video posted March 30. In that video — which was shared by the Ukrainian news service UNIAN and does not depict the killing of wounded Russians — the unit is identified as the Georgian Legion, a foreign paramilitary unit fighting on the Ukrainian side.
The Ukrainian government last month said it would launch a probe into unverified videos that purported to show Ukrainian forces shooting captive Russian soldiers in the legs.
“We are a European army, and we do not mock our prisoners,” senior presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said at the time.