In a deep mass grave, a fork and a hand, with their fingers blackened, lay under one foot in a heartbreaking corner. another man’s hand seemed to come out of the troubled ground with his fingernails in an attempt to escape his fate. On Friday morning, a team of medical examiners from Kyiv arrived on the scene to begin recording the horror inflicted on civilians by Russian troops during the six-week invasion of Moscow. They tied a door to a municipal excavator to create a makeshift wardrobe and got to work. All the people who revealed had died violently. A man was missing a large part of his skull. Another body had burned so badly, only his head and half of his torso were left, the whites of his eyes flooded with charred flesh. One person appeared to have been beheaded. As each new corpse lay in front of him, the chief investigator knelt on top of him and gently mumbled a stock while a colleague wrote it down: leather jacket, cell phone, no ID. He checked in rotten mouths the range of motion of the broken limbs and recorded burns, bullet wounds and shrapnel wounds before city volunteers helped put each corpse in a fresh body bag. Buha residents looking for their loved ones are waiting as the mass graves are searched. Photo: Anastasia Taylor-Lind / The Observer Their pink and blue plastic gloves were soon filled with blood. Between the bodies, the workers dipped their hands into the one-meter-high pile of soil that had come out of the grave so far, rubbing clumps of it between their palms to restore their grip. By the end of the day, the group had exhumed 18 bodies. But many other Bouha’s missing are waiting to be found. A wealthy northwestern city of Kiev before the start of the conflict, the name Bucha is now synonymous with Russian war crimes. After a month of fighting, its troops were crammed into positions about 40 kilometers northeast and northwest of the capital and could not move on. of Ukraine. The scale of the violence against civilians that has taken place here – killings, rapes, torture, looting – is appalling. “The morgue had no electricity and it quickly filled up. “There were still so many corpses on the streets,” said Serhiy Kaplychnyy, who oversees funerals and funeral records for Bucha Municipality. “We had to ask the Russians to let us bury them. We were told it was still cold, so it did not matter, they could lie down there. But the dogs started eating them. In the end we convinced them that it was a health issue and they let us dig the grave in the church of Apostolos Andreas since it was close to their military position and to the morgue and the hospital “. They severely damaged Russian military vehicles in a severely damaged Bucha neighborhood. Photo: Anastasia Taylor-Lind / The Observer The first batch of corpses numbered about 70, several locals said. A second mass burial of another 33 people followed. In all, about 150 civilians are believed to be inside the church. A group of about a dozen Buha residents waited on the other side of the church on Friday to find the bodies of their loved ones. Ludmyla Skakalova, a nurse with a drawn, exhausted face, said she was one of four people left to work at the city hospital after their last doctor was injured, and that the hospital had opened its doors to injured Russians. “Our soldiers also targeted us,” he said. “The Russians just called and said that there was an emergency, to drag one of the ambulance drivers and one of the territorial defense. Then a sniper shot them. The driver was killed, police said. Kukharenko Vyacheslav, a large 47-year-old man with a soft voice and bright blue eyes, spent most of the day weeping quietly by the grave. He was not looking for a loved one. He felt guilty, he said, tormented by what he described as his own “cowardice” in the face of the invasion and felt the need to testify. Natalia Lukyanenko and her daughter Anna Stefaniuk. The body of Natalia’s son was found in this grave later that day. Photo: Anastasia Taylor-Lind / The Observer “Volunteers from a nearby village tried to come to our aid and the Russians shot them in the street. “Then my neighbor came out to help and they killed him,” he said. “We were 11 children and 10 adults all hidden in a basement and I was afraid that the youngest baby would cry and inform the Russians where we were.” Three days later, Vyacheslav spoke to a group of soldiers for an hour when they came to see the household passports. “I asked them, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and they replied that they were just orders. “They knew other units were killing civilians, but they said it was not them.” “They said we were brothers. “What kind of brother arrives at your house in a tank and shoots your neighbor?” he said. “I think they were even afraid of each other.” Haylena Fiaktistava, 70, was among those hoping to find answers in the mass grave. She made a living living at home with her two sons, Dmitro and Andrei, but one day Dmitro left home to look for bread and never returned. During a bombing break three days later, Haylena and Andrei came out and found him lying face down in the middle of the road, a few blocks away, with bullet holes in his back. Another relative helped Andrei transport Dmitro’s body to the morgue, but it was full. They do not know what else to do, they left him under the tent of the small white building. Later, they heard that all the bodies in the morgue had been buried in the church. “We wrote his name and address on a piece of paper and put them in one of his socks so we could find him again,” he said. “I just want to have a proper funeral for him.” When satellite photos of the mass grave in the church of Apostle Andreas appeared earlier this week, before Ukrainian troops re-enter the city, the Kremlin was quick to deny the atrocities committed here. Shots and photos of dead civilians were “ordered” by the United States to tarnish Moscow’s reputation, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. Haylena Fiaktistava, left, waits with Tetiana Lipinska to see if Dmitro’s son is among the bodies in the mass grave. Photo: Anastasia Taylor-Lind / The Observer The events at Bucha Church on Friday gave an indisputable truth to the Kremlin lies. A military priest arrived shortly after the exhumation of the mass grave began. He placed a branch over his fatigue and held a wooden cross while blessing the pit with holy water and singing an orthodox memorial. Anna Stefaniuk, along with her husband Volodymyr and mother Natalia Lukyanenko, silently watched the researchers work. Stefaniuk was missing her brother, Lukyanenko’s son. Volodymyr was also missing a brother. The family was at the same time desperate for answers and was afraid of what the grave might tell them. As the fourth bag of the body was unfolded and shown to the mourners, Volodymyr let out a painful scream and fell to the ground. The tomb had given up one of his many secrets: his brother’s remains were among the tangle of tortured limbs and bloodied faces. A stinging air blew as it covered his face and he cried. Anna leaned over him, touching her head to his. The spring song of the birds echoed from the high arches of the church. Near the garden gate, blue and yellow crocus buds began to grow forcibly into the soil, the first flowers of a Ukrainian spring like no other.
