War Crimes Watch: A walk through Bucha’s horror
BUCHA, Ukraine — There is a body in the basement of the abandoned yellow home at the end of the street near the railroad tracks. The man is young, pale, a dried trickle of blood by his mouth, shot to death and left in the dark, and no one knows why the Russians brought him there, to a home that wasn’t his.
There is a pile of toys near the stairs to the basement. Plastic clothespins sway on an empty line under a cold, gray sky. They are all that’s left of normal on this blackened end of the street in Bucha, where tank treads lay stripped from charred vehicles, civilian cars are crushed, and ammunition boxes are stacked beside empty Russian military rations and liquor bottles.
The man in the basement is almost an afterthought, one more body in a town where death is abundant, but satisfactory explanations for it are not.
Walking through Bucha, a reporter encountered two dozen witnesses of the Russian occupation. Almost everyone said they saw a body, sometimes several more. Civilians were killed, mostly men, sometimes picked off at random. Many, including the elderly, say they themselves were threatened.
The question that survivors, investigators and the world would like to answer is why. Ukraine has seen the horrors of Mariupol, Kharkiv, Chernihiv and nearby Irpin. But the images from this town an hour’s drive from Kyiv — of bodies burned, bodies with hands bound, bodies strewn near bicycles and flattened cars — have seared themselves into global consciousness like no others.
“It certainly appears to be very, very deliberate. But it’s difficult to know what more motivation was behind this,” a senior U.S. defense official said this week, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the military assessment.
The residents of Bucha, as they venture out of cold homes and basements, offer theories. Some believe the Russians weren’t ready for an extended fight or had especially undisciplined fighters among them. Some believe the house-to-house targeting of younger men was a hunt for those who had fought the Russians in recent years in separatist-held eastern Ukraine and had been given shelter in the town.
Sometimes, they say, the Russians themselves explained why they killed.
In one backyard in Bucha are three graves, dug by neighbors too scared to put them elsewhere. One of the dead was killed on March 4, struck in the head with the butt of a rifle.
On March 15, a friend of the dead man was approached by Russians demanding his documents. They’re at home, he said. On the way there, they passed the grave. He pointed it out. The next moment, witness Iryna Kolysnik says, the soldiers shot him.
“He was talking too much,” one said, adding an expletive.
By the end, any shred of discipline broke down. “They went from normal soldiers to much, much worse,” says Roman Skytenko, 24, who saw four civilian bodies on the street near his house.
Grenades were tossed into basements, bodies thrown into wells. An elderly man at a nursing home was found dead in his bed, apparently of neglect, while a younger person, perhaps a caregiver, lay outside, shot to death. Women in their 70s were told not to stick their heads out of their houses or they’d be killed. “If you leave home, I’ll obey the order, and you know what the order is. I’ll burn your house,” Tetyana Petrovskaya recalls one soldier telling her.
Now that the Russians have left, bodies are being collected by searchers wary of booby traps and mines. The body bags are placed in rows at a cemetery. Some bags aren’t fully closed. A glimpse shows the bloodied face of a young person. Another shows a pair of white sneakers. Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk said the count of dead civilians was 320 as of Wednesday. Most died from gunshots, and some corpses with their hands tied were “dumped like firewood” into mass graves.
Vladyslav Minchenko is an artist who helps to collect the bodies. During the occupation, he found another way to help — spotting Russians through binoculars and telling the “appropriate people” where they were. Three weeks ago, he says, he was discovered.
The Russians came and stripped him and put him near the wall to be shot. But in that final moment, something changed. The Russians had a list of Ukrainian military personnel to look for, and it happened that Minchenko was staying with one.
“I was almost killed,” he says, “but someone said, ‘This is not the guy from the list.’”
He worries the Russians will be back, with more experienced fighters who might not hesitate to fire.
In a silent neighborhood, the gate of a home is open. An elderly woman in a fur coat lies in the front doorway, face down. A dog, one of many roaming the streets, stands beside her and yips. Inside, curled on the worn wooden floor under the kitchen table, is another elderly woman.
No one seems to know how they died. They have been lying there since March 5, says a neighbor, Sergiy. “Shock is not enough to describe it.” He believes a Russian sniper shot them at a distance.
Around the corner, on an empty street, a woman in a knitted cap watches from her gate. At a muffled blast from distant de-mining operations, she ducks in terror, grabbing her head. Then she sighs.
Valentyna Nekrutenko is 63 and spent the occupation with her husband, who is so ill he can barely stand. He lies on a mattress on their living room floor under blankets. Nekrutenko believes the war has shaken his mind. The dim home around them is scattered, too, with a half-made meal of bread and beetroot neglected near the sink.
Nekrutenko says she watched the Russians break into the house across the street. A piece of a mortar shell pierced her roof. Limping, not so well herself, she never went far, only going out for water.
Cut off for so long, she doesn’t know about the bodies of the elderly women a few houses away. She doesn’t know why the horrified world has come to her town to document the dead.
“Why come here?” Nekrutenko asks, honestly puzzled. “There’s nothing important about Bucha.”