by Lorenzo Cremonesi
The city had been taken by the Russians on their advance towards Kyiv at the beginning of the war. And now that it’s published, the dramatic stories of the civilians emerge
FROM OUR SEND
BORODYANKA Russians are afraid, and when they are afraid they become angry, cruel, threaten, kill and have no respect for life. For days they prevented us from rescuing our friends asking for help from the rubble. We meet 16yearold Victoria Kasmirenko in front of her wooden house, one of the few that are still standing in this ruined city. Speaks good Italian. Every year I go on holiday to a friend’s family in Apulia. He doesn’t want to exaggerate, he emphasizes several times, just to tell the world what happened here in front of his house: the Russian soldiers were all very young. They had placed the checkpoint right in front of our door, we talked to each other every day. It was clear that they were afraid. Young recruits who thought they had to do military exercises in Karsoyak, Belarus and fight with us here from dawn to dusk. She doesn’t justify them. On the contrary: we didn’t do anything to them. But they continued to threaten us for no reason. My father kept me locked in the house, he feared sexual violence as we know it happened here.
Borodyanka is immediately captured by the Russian columns advancing on Kyiv. On February 25 there will be fighting in the suburbs. The tallest buildings are on fire, the streets are filled with craters from shells and debris. While traffic was paralyzed, the Russians fired on the fleeing cars at close range, as evidenced by the abandoned corpses then crushed by tanks. The few civilians who remained in the city hid in the cellars, as we did. Also nearby was Youra Kholavko, 45, with his wife Alona. We know her very well, my mother Ludmilla was her friend since they were classmates. On February 27th they called us asking for help, saying that a cannon shot had knocked down their building and they and four or five other people were trapped in the basement. Buried alive. We ran out, but the Russians didn’t let us go. They called back and forth for over a week, they were desperate, they were dying of hunger and thirst. The Death of the Mouse. But the Russians never let us help them. Now the firefighters are pulling out their bodies, he says, crying over the rubble that the rescue workers are carefully digging up. One tragic story among many. Not difficult to collect in these devastated urban centers.
I don’t want to talk about the Russians. They’re animals! Yulia snaps, a girl sitting in a car that she’s finally supposed to pick up after four weeks in the basement. The violence was not systematic. It depended on discipline and commanders. There are two villages near here, Drusnia and Zahalzi, we know a lot of rapes took place there, reveals Evjenii, a municipal employee who now helps civil protection. One of the most dramatic stories, and precisely for that reason it needs confirmation, is about the mobile crematorium ovens with which the Russians burned corpses and at the same time covered up the evidence of their crimes. One of the first to reveal it was the mayor of Mariupol, the Black Sea city where the scale of the massacre could dwarf anything previously revealed from the Kyiv area. Vadym Boychenko speaks of the deliberate extermination of the civilian population and now claims that the death toll exceeds 5,000, including 210 children. Almost 50 people were burned alive in a bomb attack on a children’s hospital, the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN said yesterday. In the last few hours, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk has specified that mobile ovens are also used to cremate Russian soldiers: the Kremlin does not want to show the dead to prevent dissatisfaction growing in their own country. Rape allegations against intruders are also becoming more detailed. Human rights commissioner of the Kyiv parliament Ludmyla Denisova told the BBC. It would have happened to 25 women between the ages of 14 and 24 in Bucha: We document every case, no crime goes unpunished. Moscow denies and accuses the Ukrainian authorities of fabricating the scandal as a propaganda weapon.
Calculating the casualties of these six weeks of war still remains elusive. Now that the roads are becoming more accessible thanks to the fact that the Russian units that were in the Kyiv region have left the country and it is possible to reach places that until yesterday were paralyzed by the conflict, realities are popping up everywhere of violence and terror that need to be understood and quantified. According to Borodyanka residents, hundreds of bodies could be scattered under the rubble or in the fields. There are villages that have not yet been visited by the rescue teams. According to Hostomel Mayor Taras Dumenko, 400 residents, about fifteen children, are missing. They may be dead, but some have been kidnapped, says Dumenko, who replaces the elected mayor who was assassinated by the Russians earlier in the war.
April 7, 2022 (Modification April 7, 2022 | 09:42)
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