Halyna Matiushko knows that her son is dead. He knows that Serhii Matiushko was found next to four other dead on the ground in a basement in Bucha, a city on the western outskirts of Kiev that has become a slogan for Russian atrocities. He knows that Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova has called this basement a “torture chamber.” She knows that the photos sent to her by the police show her dead son with a melted face and something that seems to have broken teeth. His hands are tied behind his back. According to police, he was shot to death. What Mrs Matiushko does not know – what she cannot understand – is how this could happen. “He was just a regular employee,” Matiushko told The Globe and Mail Tuesday. “It was not a threat to the army.” A divorced father with a 20-year-old son, Serhii lived near Hostomel Airport, an important military installation that Russian forces tried to seize at the beginning of their invasion of Ukraine. Surrounded by fierce fighting, he stayed home and helped care for two elderly people in his apartment complex. But he also made plans to leave for Ivano-Frankivsk, a city almost 600 kilometers away by road, to qualify for the race. He was planning to catch a bus on March 12. As he was getting ready to leave, however, a local volunteer asked him to help him carry some cargo. By the time this job was done, the bus was gone. Ms. Matiushko never heard from Serhii again. On the day of his scheduled departure, he walked for two hours through heavy bombardment on Hostomel, but was unable to locate him. He learned from others that the local volunteer’s car was found marked with a V symbol, a symbol used by Russian forces in the invasion of Ukraine. Other Ukrainian communities reported that Russian soldiers stole cars and then marked them with a V. Halyna Matiushko shows a post on her son’s Facebook after his disappearance on Hostomel.ANTON SKYBA / The Globe and Mail For almost a month, Ms. Matiushko has been trying to find Serhii by posting requests on Facebook. He heard nothing. Then earlier this week, police sent pictures of the men found in the basement. Mrs. Matiushko immediately recognized her son’s face and the clothes he was wearing. The killing of civilians in Bucha, and especially those like Serhi, who were shot with their hands tied behind their backs, has sparked new anger in Russia. It prompted additional European sanctions, calls from Canada, the United States and others to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, and commitments by Ukraine and major Western democracies to investigate alleged war crimes. “They are not even war crimes,” Matiushko said of those who killed her son. “People are crazy. In a war, warriors shoot warriors. “Here, they shoot normal people.” On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he needed a war crimes tribunal like the one in Nuremberg after World War II to look into Russian actions. In a speech to the UN Security Council, he gave a graphic description of what the Ukrainian authorities have discovered in recent days. People “were thrown into wells, and so they died there suffering. They were killed in the apartments, their houses, they were blown up by grenades. “The civilians were crushed by tanks while they were sitting in their cars in the middle of the road, just for their pleasure,” he said. “Women were raped and killed in front of their children. “Their language came out only because the attacker did not hear what they wanted to hear from them.” Funeral services are collecting bodies from the Ukrainian city of Bucha.ANTON SKYBA / The Globe and Mail He warned that the atrocities revealed in Bucha would be found elsewhere in Ukraine, where the city of Mariupol remains under siege, Kherson and surrounding areas remain under Russian occupation and Kharkiv is preparing for an expected new military offensive. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has accused Western countries of promoting “hysteria” in order to “find a pretext to suspend talks” between Moscow and Kiev, he said. Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, dismissed Mr Zelensky’s comments as “a huge amount of lies”. But the streets of Bukha remain for Ukraine the most vivid depiction of Russian belligerent behavior. On Tuesday, officials brought foreign journalists through the city, showing them a stack of six corpses, with empty eye sockets staring out of the skin tanned by the fire. There were four women, one of them small enough to be a child. One clearly showed that he had been hit by a bullet, said Kiev police chief Andriy Nebitov. “They executed people they found – then burned them to cover up the crime,” he said. “To call the Russians ‘beasts’ would be a gentle description of them,” said Larissa Savenko, a resident of Bukha. He lives on Vokzalna Street, where residents counted 72 vehicles, many of them armored troops, on a Russian motorcade that passed on February 27 in the direction of Kiev. When Ukrainian forces attacked, the ensuing battle turned the road on Ms. Savenko’s doorstep into a metal cemetery, with heavy armor frames still in place as a monument to one of the most important early battles of the war. Fighting on Vokzalna Street destroyed several houses and the roof and walls of Ms Savenko’s house. Without electricity or other basic services for weeks, she survived on frozen meat and lard stored in a ditch dug in her backyard. The flight of Russian forces in recent days has done little to allay its fears. “The most important thing for me is not to return a second time, as they did in Chechnya. “This is scary,” he said. Indeed, even if the fighting has stopped, the war in Bucha is far from over. Twenty-five demining workers are now searching the area for explosives. By Tuesday afternoon, 1,126 potentially explosive devices had been identified, including bullets and an unexploded ordnance. A damaged Russian military vehicle burned down on Vokzalkna Street in Bucha.ANTON SKYBA / The Globe and Mail Millions of hectares of Ukraine should be sought for mines, authorities said on Tuesday. But it took five days to sweep a small area of downtown Bhutan, said Petros Kiselyov, deputy head of the State Emergency Service for the Kiev region. This attempt revealed grenades equipped to explode in four compartments, at least one of which appeared to belong to a Ukrainian soldier. Mr Kiselyov said he had seen three bodies trapped in the blasts, with live grenades hidden under the bodies. “Russia, Ukraine and Belarus were sister countries,” he said. “It’s unbelievable to see that.” Mrs Matiushko is also struggling to understand. While looking for Serhii, she also cared for her other son, Roman, 42, who remains in hospital with multiple gunshot wounds. He was shot dead by Russian soldiers while standing in line at a grocery store, he said. His abdomen and both hips were hit, according to a hospital report. A bullet fell on his left hip, causing multiple fractures. Roman needs surgery and “is in a very bad condition now,” Matiushko said. Justice, he said, must be done. “I want the truth. “And I want these people to be punished,” he said. On Tuesday, he traveled to Bucha to ask police to leave Serhii’s body for burial. But what happened to him must not be forgotten, he said. “The Russians say they did not commit these crimes, that they just imagined it,” he said, pointing to a photo of Serhiy lying in the basement, his face spooky under the lens of a flashlight. “But he could not imagine,” he said. “This is my son. This is my son.” Our Morning and Afternoon Newsletters are compiled by Globe editors, giving you a brief overview of the day’s most important headlines. Register today.
