The Times - UK (2022-04-04)

6 2GM Monday April 4 2022 | the times

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outs. “They stripped my clothes to look

for tattoos, Nazi or nationalist, even

though there was nothing to find.”

Men started to hide in their houses

and women went instead to fetch water

or seek permission to light fires to cook

after electricity and gas were cut off.

Tetyana Zabarylo, 40, was beaten

with the butt of a Kalashnikov rifle by

soldiers who stole her phone. An angry

purple bruise is beneath her eye, barely

covered by makeup. “Tell Nato thank

you for not closing the sky,” she says

bitterly, a reference to Ukraine’s repeat-

ed pleas for a no-fly zone.

She does not know yet how many

neighbours she has lost. “We have had

no communication for weeks,” she said.

“It’s hard to tell who is dead and who

escaped. Tell us, what does the world

think of what is happening?”

Stanislav Polukhin, 34, a special

police battalion commander, was first

sent to Bucha two weeks ago amid

heavy fighting to help extract civilians

as the military pushed forward. Despite

what he had been told, the Russian

soldiers’ behaviour still shocked him.

“They used civilians like bait,”

Polukhin says. “They taped white tapes

on their arms and told the people, just

go there. They are civilians. When our

military, our forces, see the people with

the white tape, they identity them as

enemy. And that is what they wanted.”

Yesterday afternoon police and

soldiers picked their way through a rec-

reational summer camp where children

came to enjoy forest surroundings,

playing sports through the summer.

Mattresses were pulled from stores

and used as protective barriers against

windows, while others were lined on

the floor where soldiers slept.

In a basement below a dormitory,

there was another grisly discovery: the

bodies of five men, each with a single

bullet wound. An explosives team

checked them, fearful of booby traps.

“We have found that already in Irpin,”

one soldier explained. “They rig the

dead with mines to kill those who come

to recover them.”

Police believe the victims were main-

tenance staff, captured when the camp

commandeered it and killed before the

Russians pulled out.

Moscow’s attempt to launch a large-

scale assault on Kyiv is the stuff of stra-

tegic disaster, plagued not only by jaw-

dropping logistical failure and a dismal

understanding of the Ukrainian psyche

but also by the unequal battle between

clanking Soviet armour and western

technology gifted by Britain and the

US. On a back road from Kyiv to Irpin,

the detritus of a pitched battle between

Russian tanks and Ukrainian-held

anti-tank missiles tells its own story.

The shrunken, charred corpse of a

tank commander is visible in his shat-

tered vehicle, its turret uselessly on one

side. Ukrainian officers, coming to join

their comrades in Bucha, stop their cars

and take gloating selfies.

Bucha lies to the northwest of Kyiv,

just beyond Irpin, the site of ferocious

shelling and fighting as Russian troops

struggled to advance towards the capi-

tal after Ukrainian troops blew up the

bridge across the Irpin river to halt

them where they were. Last week Presi-

dent Zelensky hailed Irpin as Ukraine’s

first “hero city” of the invasion after it

was liberated from Russian control.

Yesterday, after more of Bucha’s hor-

rors began to emerge, Zelensky struck a

more furious note, accusing President

Putin of genocide. “This is about the

elimination of the whole nation and the

people,” he said. “We are the citizens of

Ukraine and we don’t want to be sub-

dued to the policy of Russian Federa-

tion. This is the reason we are being

destroyed and exterminated.”

The litany of horrors in Bucha are re-

peated in newly liberated settlements

around Kyiv. There are reports of

mothers raped in front of their children,

fleeing families murdered in their cars

and men of military age executed.

Russia’s defence ministry denied any

part in the alleged atrocities in Bucha,

saying photographs and videos from

the scene were “the latest fabrication of

the Kyiv regime for western media, as

with the maternity hospital in

Mariupol, and in other towns”.

The ministry said the corpses in the

footage had, suspiciously, not turned

rigid, had “uncoagulated blood in the

wounds” and did not bear the skin dis-

colouration associated with cadavers. It

claimed that Russian forces had left the

area on March 30, adding that Anatoly

Fedoruk, the mayor, had confirmed the

departure in a video on March 31

without mentioning any executions.

“For that reason, it is not surprising

that the so-called evidence of crimes in

Bucha only appeared four days later

when officers of the SBU [Security Ser-

vice of Ukraine] and representatives of

Ukrainian television arrived,” it said.

“Not a single resident was hurt by vio-

lent action while this town was under

control of the Russian armed forces.”

The ministry also claimed that

Ukrainian forces had shelled the south-

ern outskirts of Bucha “non stop”, while

Russian forces had not prevented locals

leaving to the north.

In Irpin, Mikhail Khyshchynskyi, 43,

returned home to face what Russian

soldiers had left behind when they ran-

sacked his townhouse. His white Volvo,

Kyiv

BELARUS

Chernihiv

R Desna

R Dnieper

R Irpin

UKRAINE

Irpin

Bucha

Brovary

Byshiv

Andriivka

Borodyanka

Berestyanka Hostomel

Kukhari

Ivankiv

Poliske

Pripyat

20 miles

Chernobyl

nuclear plant

Past Russian-

held territory

Russian-held

territory as of

Apr 2

Ukrainian armed

forces advance

Ukrainian

counteroffensive

as of Apr 2

Behind the pink-tiled building, sand-
bagged with cement sacks by Russian
soldiers, the men lie still and silent as
snow falls softly. One has his hands tied
behind his back with army boot laces;
another with plastic tape wound round
and round his wrists. A third has his
ankles bound with electrical cable, an
empty Russian ration box by his side.
All of their shoes are missing.
Inside the filthy, rubbish-strewn
building where the soldiers made their
camp, a small black puppy sits on a sofa,
oblivious to the horrors outside. Why
these eight men, all in civilian dress and
shot through the head and chest, were
killed is yet another conundrum for
police and investigators newly arrived
in Bucha after Ukrainian soldiers
recaptured it from Russian occupiers.
The town is hardly short of such
puzzles. When Ukrainian soldiers first
drove in here, their vehicles were forced
to swerve to avoid civilian bodies
littering its broken streets. Yesterday
the bodies were being collected, zipped
into black body bags or flung unshroud-
ed into a mass grave behind the golden
onion domes of St Andrew’s Church.
Officials said that it held 280 dead and
counting.
As the Ukrainian military picks
through devastated buildings for un-
exploded ordnance, a catalogue of
horror suggesting widespread war

crimes is emerging, a grim predictor of
what may yet be found in towns and
cities under Russian control or siege.
Bucha was one of the early targets in
Russia’s attempted assault on Kyiv,
called off by the Kremlin last week to
refocus efforts on the south and east of
Ukraine. The Russians arrived so swift-
ly that many, especially the elderly, had
no chance to flee or did not believe that
what was to come would be so grim.
“They arrived in a column of tanks
and it looked like something out of the
Second World War,” Svetlana Klyum-
chyk, 46, a housewife said. “They were
young and mostly stayed away from us.
Later they started coming to our houses
and demanding: where are the Nazis?”
The first wave of Russians took over
commercial buildings and abandoned
apartment blocks and houses. But as
the Ukrainian counteroffensive gath-
ered pace, the occupiers grew increas-
ingly paranoid, targeting male civilians
in the belief that they were helping to
inform on Russian positions or other-
wise working against them.
“They captured me and tortured and
interrogated me,” Volodymyr Ivanov,
40, a sports equipment salesman, said,
his hands shaking, his breath scented
with vodka as he queued for food hand-

The dead of Bucha are being laid to
rest in a mass grave behind the church
PHOTOGRAPH: PAULA BRONSTEIN FOR THE TIMES

News War in Ukraine

Helpless, with arms bound, they

Ukrainian forces find corpses dressed

in civilian clothes as they return to a

town that was captured by Russians.

Catherine Philp reports from Bucha