Saturday 30 April 2022 The Guardian •
17Justin McCurryThe Ukrainian president, Volodymyr
Zelenskiy, has described how Rus-
sian forces came close to capturing
or assassinating him.
His time as the leader of a country
under attack could have ended withinAlex HernFacebook moderators have called on
the company to let them take action
against users who praise or support
the Russian military’s alleged mas-
sacres in Bucha and across Ukraine.
Almost a month after evidence of
widespread murder and mass graves
was uncovered by Ukrainian forces
re taking control of the suburb of
Kyiv, the social network still has n ot
fl agged the atrocity as an “internally
designated” incident, the moderators
say. That ties their hands in how they
can treat content related to the kill-
ings, they say.
“ This event hasn’t been even des-
ignated a ‘violating event’, let alone
a hate crime,” said one moderator,
who spoke to the Guardian on condi-
tion of anonymity. “On that same day
there was a shooting in the US, with
one fatality and two casualties, and
this was declared a violating event
within three hours.”
Under Facebook’s public moder-
ation guidelines , users are barred
from posting content that makes
violent threats through “references
to historical or fi ctional incidents of
violence”. But in private documents
issued to moderators, who work for
third-party contracting fi rms such as
Accenture or Bertelsmann AG, they
are told to wait for regional input
from Facebook itself before deter-
mining whether a “documented
violent incident” counts.
“My suspicion is that this is just not
as close, not as important to Amer-
ican audiences or the American
public, so it just doesn’t get the atten-
tion,” the Facebook moderator said.
A spokesperson for Meta, Face-
book’s parent company, said: “It’s
wrong to suggest we wouldn’t remove
graphic content that celebrates or glo-
rifi es the atrocities in Bucha ... We’ve
long standing policies that make clear
this content is not allowed .”
Facebook said state use of force
was treated diff erently to criminal
acts of violence under its policies.hours of Russia’s invasion beginning,
according to interviews in Time mag-
azine. Speaking to Simon Shuster, a
reporter who spent a fortnight in
the presidential compound in Kyiv,
Zelenskiy described how Russian
troops came close to fi nding him and
his family as they attempted to seize
the capital’s government district on
day one of the confl ict.
While many of his memories of
those fi rst few hours remained “frag-
mented”, Zelenskiy said pre-dawn
on 24 February stood out. After the
bombing had started, he and his wife,
Olena Zelenska , went to tell their
daughter, 17, and son, nine, to prepare
to fl ee their home. “We woke them
up,” he told Time. “It was loud. There
were explosions over there.”
The Ukrainian military toldZelenskiy
Leader tells of
close call with
enemy forces
Moderators in
call to remove
atrocity praise
Destroyed buildings in Irpin, near
Kyiv. Western offi cials say Russian
forces are fi ring indiscriminately
as they shift their focus to Donbas
PHOTOGRAPH: VALENTYN OGIRENKO/REUTERS
According to a Pentagon offi cial
quoted by the New York Times , Rus-
sian troops, however, are still only
making “incremental” progress in the
campaign around Izium.
Commenting on the reported
appointment of Gerasimov to
command the off ensive “at the oper-
ational and tactical level” a senior
western offi cial briefed journalists
yesterday that it underlined the oper-
ational diffi culties Russia was seeing
that it needed to move its most sen-
ior military offi cer forward.
“ The reports, if credible, show the
command and control challenges that
Russia is facing. The fact that Gerasi-
mov has come forward to get some
momentum behind assaults is a real
statement of the challenges .”
The offi cial added: “In the Donbas,
we are seeing slow progress – some-
times as little as a kilometre a day in
terms of terrain. And what we are see-
ing there is the indiscriminate use
of fi re power while they are being
smarter using artillery in supporting
ground forces. But it is being done
in such a way that it puts the civilian
population at enormous risk .”
With the failure of its attempted
rapid attack Kyiv in the initial weeks
of the war, which saw Russian spe-
cial forces infi ltrate close to where
the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr
Zelenskiy, was sheltering, Moscow
has settled on slowly grinding away
at Ukrainian resistance.
And while Moscow has lost thou-
sands of troops and hundreds of
armoured vehicles, Ukraine’s spend-
ing on ammunition and weapons
systems has also left it depleted,
explaining the $33bn (£26 bn) military
aid package announced this week by
the US president, Joe Biden.
All of which has not only raised the
spectre of a long war, but the risk that
in the end – as Boris Johnson said a
week ago – Russia may prevail.
“We need to be prepared for the
long term,” Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato
secretary general, said this week.
“There is absolutely the possibility
that this war will drag on and last for
months and years.”
That assessment followed com-
ments by Boris Johnson last week
that painted an equally pessimistic
picture, including the prospect of a
Russian victory.
“I think the sad thing is that that is
a realistic possibility,” he said. “Putin
has a huge army. He has a very diffi -
cult political position because he’s
made a catastrophic blunder.
“The only option he now has really
is to continue to try to use his appall-
ing grinding approach led by artillery,
trying to grind the Ukrainians down. ”
That pessimism has been driven
many factors. Even while Bulgaria
has off ered to help Ukraine export its
wheat via the port of Varna, Russia’s
naval blockade of Ukraine’s coast
remains signifi cantly damaging.
In the short term, despite the
heavy losses of men and materia l,
Russian forces still have easier access
to equipment resupplies until US and
other western arms supplies step up,
although western offi cials say that
the balance of forces is no longer quite
so “overwhelming” for Ukraine.
‘Someone has to do it’
The volunteers exhuming the dead
I
n the woods on a roadside
near Borodyanka, 40 miles
from Kyiv , police were
overseeing the exhumation
of two men who were killed
and buried next to what local
people say was a Russian military
checkpoint.
Alongside the offi cers were four
men in civilian clothing wearing
gardening gloves – ordinary
Ukrainians with no previous
experience of this gut-wrenching
work – who have become
volunteers collecting the hundreds
of bodies still being dug up in
towns bordering the capital.
It has been a month since the
Ukrainian army pushed Russian
forces out of the Kyiv region , yet
local police and volunteers are
still fi nding new graves. More than
1,000 bodies have been recovered
there, according to Ukrainian
prosecutors , who said many more
people were killed by bombs,
making their remains hard to fi nd.
The police forces of small
towns and villages have been
drawn into investigating one of
the largest atrocities in Europe in
recent times. Amid the scale of this
endeavour, offi cers are relying on
ordinary Ukrainians to do the work
while they take statements and
document the deaths.
The volunteer body collectors
are tasked with picking up rotting
and often mutilated corpses from
the graves, putting them in body
bags, numbering them, then
delivering them to whichever
morgue in the region has room.
“I didn’t know this is what we’d
be doing,” said Vasily Pasieka, a
middle-aged construction worker
from the Chernivtsi region , who
was driving the van carr ying the
bodies. “But someone has to do it
for the relatives, for the police.”
The volunteers’ employer
wanted to do something to help
after hearing about the mass
atrocities in the Kyiv region, and
called one of the improvised
humanitarian aid centres who said
they needed a van and manpower.
Pasieka and his colleague Serhiy
Roholsky volunteered to go to the
region with one of the company’svans. “We pick up eight to 11
bodies a day,” said Roholsky.
“Every day it’s diff erent but we
fi nd all sorts – men, women,
young, old, middle-aged.”
One of the two bodies was a
pension-aged man who had been
decapitated but whose head could
not be found. Both corpses were
twisted and mangled. It looked
as though their limbs had been
broken in several places.
The son of the man with the
severed head, Serhiy Kubitsky,
was there to witness the
exhumation and give a statement
to the police. He and his family
had left the village for the safety
of western Ukraine when the war
started, but his father had not
wanted to leave.
“I didn’t believe it was him
when they told me,” said Kubitsky.
He said that his neighbours found
his father’s body in the woods
near the Russian checkpoint.
The two worst instances in
this relatively small area of the
Kyiv region where the volunteers
worked, Roholsky said, were
when a 15-year-old girl was
exhumed from a mass grave near
the town’s GP surgery, and when
they dug up the body of an elderly
man who had been doused in
petrol and set alight. The man’s▲ Volunteers near Borodyanka
carry exhumed bodies. Many of
those found had been tortured
PHOTOGRAPH: ALESSIO MAMO/THE GUARDIAN▲ Volodymyr Zelenskiy told Time
magazine he was almost capturedwife told Roholsky she had been
tied up by Russian soldiers and
forced to watch.
After the two men in the
woods , the next stop was the
cemetery of a nearby village,
where the team were to dig up
two bodies to register the cause
of death.
Stanislav Kozynchuk , the
d eputy head of the Kyiv region
prosecutor’s offi ce, said the two
people who had been buried
in the cemetery were killed by
airstrikes , which he thought may
have used clusters bombs.
Evidence collected by the
Guardian during visits to Bucha,
Hostomel and Borodyanka –
and reviewed by independent
weapons experts – showed
that Russian troops had used
cluster bombs , which are widely
banned across the world, as
well as extremely powerful
unguided bombs, which are not
permitted for use in populated
areas and are responsible for the
destruction of several blocks of
fl ats in the Kyiv region.
“It is essential that all bodies
are exhumed and identifi ed
so that victims’ families can
be informed, and the exact
causes of death established,”
Michelle Bachelet, the UN
high commissioner for human
rights, has said. “All measures
should be taken to preserve
evidence.” Isobel Koshiw and
Lorenzo Tondo BorodyankaZelenskiy that Russian strike teams
had parachuted into Kyiv to kill or
capture him and his family. “Before
that night, we had only ever seen such
things in the movies,” Andriy Yermak ,
his chief of staff , told the magazine.
Gunfi ghts broke out around the
government quarter as night fell onthe fi rst day of the war, Shuster wrote.
“Guards inside the compound shut
the lights and brought bulletproof
vests and assault rifl es for Zelenskiy
and about a dozen of his aides.”
Russian troops made two attempts
to storm the compound while
Zelenskiy’s family were still inside,
according to Shuster.
The next night, after refusing
off ers of more secure surroundings- including an evacuation by US and
British forces so he could set up a gov-
ernment in exile – Zelenskiy walked
outside into the courtyard to record
a now-famous video message on his
phone. At that moment, he said, he
became truly aware of his role. “You
understand that they’re watching.
You’re a symbol. You need to act the
way the head of state must act.”