6 Tuesday April 5 2022 | the times
News
Archpriest Piotr Pavlenko had just
finished saying prayers over the body of
one of Hostomel’s fallen and returned
to his church when the townspeople
burst in to say his friend Yriy was dead.
Yriy Pzylyko, the mayor, had been
delivering food and medicines to civil-
ians stranded by fighting when their
humanitarian convoy came under fire
from Russian snipers.
When Pavlenko went to face down
the soldiers and retrieve Pzylyko’s body,
and that of his driver, Ivan Zoryo, they
looked on his vestments and cross with
something close to shame. “Don’t touch
the body or it will explode and you’ll
blow up with it,” a soldier shouted.The
priest shrank back.
It is yet another horror being visited
on the dead, and an atrocity on the
living, that was first witnessed in the
early days of the war and is now being
uncovered as settlement after settle-
ment is taken back from Russian troops
Pavlenko was “walking slowly, only a
few metres when one of the soldiers
shouted “Stop!” Pavlenko and his verg-
er, who had come to help, hid behind a
wall as the soldier unzipped Pzylyko’s
jacket and began dismantling the
explosives. “Only after he finished was
I allowed to take the body,” he said. “I
wanted to take Ivan’s body too but they
said, no, you must come tomorrow, we
can’t dismantle it in time.”
By the time the fighting subsided
enough for Pavlenko to return, two
days later, the soldiers had gone. “We
did not know if Ivan’s body was clear or
not,” he explained. “So we got a very
long rope, maybe 15 metres, and tied it
around his legs. We all pulled it and
nothing happened. So we were able to
take him away.”
Pavlenko wanted to give the men a
proper burial because as well as being
the mayor “and a very good man, Yriy
was my friend.” He couldn’t summonBooby-trap snipers shamed by
as they retreat from around Kyiv. In
Irpin, several such bodies were discov-
ered rigged with explosives before
specialists moved on to the horrors of
Bucha, where the bodies of executed
civilians lay in the streets.
Ukrainian troops and police moving
through buildings occupied by the
Russians uncovered victims in base-
ments and courtyards, all the time
urging journalists accompanying them
to stand back until the dead could be
examined for booby traps intended to
kill and maim.
Bucha’s atrocities have shocked the
world but may only be the tip of the
iceberg, according to the Ukrainian MP
Oleksandr Yurchenko, who was in
Hostomel as a territorial defence vol-
unteer yesterday, helping the town
recover from weeks of heavy fighting.
“Bucha was not so badly damaged as
Hostomel but crimes were carried out
deliberately on civilians,” Yurchenko
said. “Now we are discovering this is the
case for so many places that the Rus-
sians occupied. In places where the
fighting was intense, like Hostomel,
probably more people have been killed.
In occupied places like Bucha, women
were raped, children were shot, people’s
bodies were run over.”
President Zelensky visited Bucha
yesterday to see the aftermath of the
Russian occupation. He told reporters:
“These are war crimes and will be
recognised by the world as genocide.”Nobody knows how many people
have been killed in Hostomel, one of
the first towns around Kyiv to come
under fire after Russian war planners
identified its sprawling cargo airport as
the target for an airborne assault on the
capital. The fighting raged through the
airport and the town as the Ukrainians
repeatedly pushed back waves of Rus-
sian paratroopers and the armoured
columns that followed them.
Antonov airfield is now a post-apoc-
alyptic landscape, littered with burnt-
out military vehicles and the shattered
carcass of the Mriya, meaning dream or
inspiration, once the world’s biggest air-
craft and a source of Ukrainian
national pride.
It is the discovery of civilian dead
littering the town that “is like a horror
movie,” Yurchenko said. “We keep find-
ing bodies.”
Pavlenko recalled how he was
begged to oversee emergency garden
burials by families too afraid to move
the bodies of loved ones from their
homes. He had just returned from one
when the news of Pzylyko’s murder
reached him. He set off from the church
with a wheelbarrow and a white sheet
to the place where the men had fallen.
“I saw a multi-storey building badly
damaged and Russian snipers in the
window,” he said. “I lifted up the white
sheet and said I want to speak to the
commander. I want to take the bodies
and you must let me do it.”Pzylyko’s siblings who had fled at the
start of the invasion, nor could he find
coffins, so had the men wrapped in
cloth before being buried in the yard of
Hostomel’s Holy Intercession Church.
“It was better to bury them like that,” he
said. “When the war is over, we will dis-
inter their bodies, wash them and give
them a funeral with full honours. We
will do it the day Ukraine wins the war.”
After Pzylyko was killed, Russian sol-
diers came to the church and said they
knew the mayor was dead. They asked
Pavlenko to take over. As representa-
tives of the government that President
Putin has denounced as Nazis, mayors
of towns across in Ukraine have been
chased out, kidnapped or killed by Rus-
sian troops. Over the weekend, the
body of Olha Sukhenko, the head of
Motyzhyn village west of Kyiv, was dis-
covered in a mass grave along with her
husband Ihor and son Oleksandr. She
was abducted on March 23 and, refus-
ing to let her go alone, Ihor and Olek-
sandr went with her.
Pavlenko refused to collaborate. Yes-
terday he prayed over another body, an
unidentified shelling victim found in a
field. While he blames Moscow for the
invasion, the soldiers’ actions are test-
ing even his Christian charity. “I don’t
think Ukrainians will forgive them,” he
says. On his own absolution, he is silent.
Horror of Ukraine, letters, page 32
Putin must face an international
tribunal, leading article, page 33President Zelensky in Bucha yesterday, where he told reporters that the world would recognise Russia’s murder of civilians there as genocide. A satellite image shows a mass grave, circled, at St Andrew’s church
Russians shout warning
after placing explosives
on their victims, writes
Catherine
Philp from
Hostomel
Tanya Nedashkivska, 57, mourns her
husband, one of the dead of Bucha
News War in Ukraine