The Times - UK (2022-04-09)

10 Saturday April 9 2022 | the times

News

Volodymyr Borovchenko stepped out
on Yablunska Street for the first time
since Russian soldiers swarmed into
Bucha six days earlier.
It was March 5, a Saturday, and he
wanted to reach the disabled children
he cared for at an orphanage in Vorsel,
a neighbouring village. The street
seemed quiet as he moved gingerly.
But he walked into an ambush. A
sniper had been lying in wait, deter-
mined to keep the street clear of all
human life. Having suffered heavy
losses, the Russians had grown more ag-
gressive, ordering people to stay inside.
The first to die on Yablunska Street
was a female cyclist whose death was
captured by a Ukrainian drone that
caught video of a Russian tank opening
fire on her.
Her body was left on the street for a
month. She was identified as Iryna Filk-
ina, 52, a make-up artist, after friends
recognised her distinctive nail art from
a photograph of her curled hand.
Borovchenko, 58, was shot soon aft-
erwards. When his son came out to
drag his father’s body back into the
house, he was shot through the shoul-
der and forced to retreat inside.
“They entered Bucha as if it was some
kind of parade,” Vasily Mykolayovych,
63, a friend of Borovchenko for four
decades, said. Mykolayovych learnt
about the death of his friend, godfather
to his children, 12 days later when he
emerged from his basement.
He wept when he saw the body.
Other corpses littered the street, in-
cluding those of two men he did not re-
cognise, whose hands had been tied be-
hind their backs before they were shot.
By the time the Russians retreated on
March 31, at least 17 bodies were left in
the street. Video filmed by Ukrainian
soldiers a day later show their vehicle
swerving to avoid the corpses. On April
1 the first pictures of the street were
captured by an agency photographer.
If Bucha has become synonymous
with the gravest of Russian war crimes,
as evidence emerges of systematic exe-
cution-style killings and torture, then
Yablunska Street is its ground zero. It
has emerged as the centrepiece of
Russia’s increasingly implausible cam-
paign to cast the atrocities as a hoax set
up by the Ukrainian army to frame it for
war crimes.
Russia’s lies have met with powerful
rebuttals, not only from the testimony
of Yablunska’s survivors but also the
satellite images and drone video that
show its victims were mown down
while Russian soldiers were in control
of Bucha, long before Ukrainian forces
pushed them out.
Almost 90 per cent of the more than
400 civilian bodies recovered so far in
Bucha have wounds from bullets, not
shrapnel, discrediting the Kremlin’s

claims that those lying dead in the

streets were victims of crossfire or

shelling. It emerged on Wednesday that

German intelligence had intercepted

radio messages of Russian soldiers

talking about the killings in Bucha.

Many of their descriptions of the

deaths matched those that took place in

Yablunska Street, which runs parallel to

the Bucha River. The Russians’ next

target was Irpin, the city on the out-

skirts of Kyiv.

The soldiers’ anger at their failure to

penetrate Irpin appears to have played

into the mounting paranoia that civil-

ians were informing on them.

Russian forces began bursting into

homes, ordering men to strip to see if

they bore patriotic tattoos that might

indicate military service.

One of them was Mykola Korniy-

chyk, 62, Mykolayovych’s neighbour,

who was trying to cook over a fire in his

garden when the soldiers came in. They

told him to take off his shirt but shot

him before he could. He was buried in a

small grave marked out by bricks in the

garden, yards from where he was killed.

His sister wept quietly beside his grave

yesterday.

Ruslan Kravchenko, Bucha’s district

prosecutor, led teams of investigators

on Wednesday uncovering atrocities at

a glass factory that the Russians took

over as a base, turning it into a torture

and killing chamber.

They recovered the body of Dmytro

Chaplyhin, 21, who had been beaten

and burnt with cigarettes before being

fatally shot through the chest.

Two other victims lay near by, one

decapitated with his head burnt and

placed at his feet. Officials examined

the scene and local residents were sum-

moned for testimony but the men could

not be identified. The corpses were

zipped into body bags and taken away.

Borovchenko did not die as one of the

many nameless victims, however,

thanks to his friend Mykolayovych.

“We knew each other for more than

40 years,” he said. “We raised children

and grandchildren together. We lived

our lives in parallel.” Many of the dead

on Yablunska were shot in the stomach,

he said. “A slow and painful way [to

die],” he added.

Mykolayovych insisted that he had

many Russian friends and classmates

from his college days.

“But I haven’t spoken to them since

this started,” he said. “What would I

say? How do you forgive this?”

He pointed to the bloodstains on the

tarmac where another neighbour, Oleh

Abramov, 40, was hauled out and shot

in the head as he knelt on the ground

with his shirt pulled over his head, like

an executioner’s hood.

“All this hate will stay for 50 or 100

years,” Mykolayovych said.

President Zelensky, who held back

tears as he visited Bucha this week, has

said that the atrocities will make any

peace agreement with Russia much

more difficult to reach.

He has warned that yet worse atroci-

ties may be discovered as Russian sol-

diers are pushed back from other fronts.

The number of dead in Bucha was

mounting yesterday as people who had

fled their homes before the fighting re-

turned to make grim discoveries.

“Please will you come and see my war

crime?” Grygoriy Rychkovskuy, 83,

asked meekly on a road around the cor-

ner from Yablunska Street.

He was standing outside a building

supplies company office where eight

men were found with their hands and

ankles tied, gunshots through the head

and chest.

Those bodies were removed by city

officials last week but the charred re-

mains of Volodymyr, 50, Rychkovskuy’s

son, was still sitting behind the wheel of

the car where he was shot on March 3

by a Russian sniper, after visiting his

father.

Volodymyr’s wife, Olena Makovozo-

va, 44, who was in the car with him and

has fled to Germany, recalled the

horrors.

“We were passing by Yablunska

Street and I told my husband, ‘Vova

someone is trying to shoot us,’ ” she

said. “Vova slowed down the car, the

shooting got louder then I saw big red

stain on the dashboard in front of him.

He collapsed and I started shaking him,

talking to him and telling him to ‘Wake

up, because they will kill us now’. But he

wasn’t breathing.

“I was shaking him and shouting at

him first and then I tried to get out of

the car. When I opened the door I saw

this huge dog, like a wolf, next to the car,

that was roaring at me, and it tried to

jump inside the car and climb on my

bleeding husband.”

After Olena escaped and hid behind

a nearby bus, the car exploded. She

stayed with neighbours before leaving

Bucha last month.

She reached Kyiv on March 9

through a so-called humanitarian cor-

ridor after Russian troops gave them

three hours to flee.

She travelled to Germany as a re-

fugee but still mourns for her husband.

“He was the love of my life,” she said

as she wept down the telephone from

Germany. “I feel so much pain that I

cannot say goodbye and bury his body.

“I told the Ukrainian soldiers in Kyiv,

‘It is too late to save my husband but

please save beautiful Bucha.’ ”

Overwhelmed by the scale of the car-

nage, officials in Bucha have not yet

come for Volodymyr’s remains.

They told Rychkovskuy that if he

wants, he can take his son’s remains and

bury them in his own garden.

Too frail to do so, and paralysed by

grief, Rychkovskuy could only stand

weeping by the burnt-out car.

“Nothing more can be done to hurt

him,” he whispered. “Dogs already ate

almost everything.”

Finding justice will be hard for the

survivors, even as investigators begin

trying to build a war crimes case against

the offending soldiers.

While Mykolayovych knows that the

Russians are to blame, he suggests their

actions were made possible by Nato’s

refusal to approve a no-fly zone.

He said: “When you write this down

please ask, ‘Why didn’t they close the

sky?’ If the sky had been closed, none of

this would have happened. Look how

bravely our soldiers fought.”

Mykolayovych gestures at the

destroyed tank column on Vokzalna

Street, from where the first fatal shots of

Yablunska Street’s agony came. “With

your help, they could have stopped all

of this from ever happening.”

Street where step

outside meant

a sniper’s bullet

Bucha bears the scars

of atrocities by the

invaders who

shot civilians at

will, Catherine

Philp reports

News War in Ukraine

Church of

St Andrew

Train

station

Bridge

H

H

Mass

grave

Yablunska Street

Vokzalna Street

BUCHA

IRPIN

E

Destroyed

column of

Russian tanks

River Bucha

Russian

command

post

Russian sniper positions

Half mile

UKRAINE

20 miles

Irpin Kyiv

Bucha

17 bodies found

along this

stretch of road

Russian heavy military

equipment depot

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