MYKULYCHI, Ukraine (AP) — On a quiet street lined with walnut trees was a cemetery containing four bodies that had not yet found a home.
All fell victim to Russian soldiers in this village outside the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Their temporary coffins were in one grave together. Volunteers dug them up one by one on Sunday – two weeks after the soldiers disappeared.
This spring is a sombre season of planting and replanting in the towns and villages around Kyiv. Bodies hastily buried during the Russian occupation are now being recovered for possible war crimes investigations. More than 900 civilian victims have been found so far.
All four bodies here were killed on the same day on the same street. So says the local man who provided their caskets. He leaned forward and kissed the graveyard’s wrought-iron crosses as he walked to the makeshift grave.
The volunteers tried digging with shovels, then gave up and called an excavator. While they waited, they told of their work of secretly burying and then recovering bodies during the months of Russian occupation. A young man recalled being spotted by soldiers who pointed guns at him and told him, “Don’t look up,” while he was digging a grave.
The excavator arrived and rumbled past the cemetery’s wooden outbuilding. Soon there was a smell of fresh earth and the murmuring, “There they are.”
A woman appeared and wept. Ira Slepchenko was the wife of a man buried here. No one told her he was being dug up now. Another victim’s wife arrived. Valya Naumenko peered into the grave, and then hugged Ira. “Don’t break down,” she said. “I need you to be okay.”
The two couples lived side by side. On the last day before the Russians left the village, soldiers knocked on a house. Valya’s husband, Pavlo Ivanyuk, opened the door. The soldiers took him to the garage and, apparently without explanation, shot him in the head.
Then the soldiers called out, “Is anyone else here?”
Ira’s husband, Sasha Nedolezhko, heard the shot. But he thought the soldiers would search the houses if no one answered. He opened the door and the soldiers shot him too.
The men’s coffins were lifted out with the others and then broken open. The four bodies, wrapped in blankets, were placed in body bags. The lace-trimmed white lining of each coffin was dyed red where the head had been.
Ira watched from afar, smoking, but stood by the empty coffins as the others left. “This whole country is in the blood and it’s going to take years to recover,” she said.
She had known her husband was here. Nine days after his temporary burial, she came to the cemetery, which was dotted with picnic tables, following the local custom of spending time with the dead. She brought coffee and biscuits.
“I want this war to end as soon as possible,” she said.
The other bodies were a teacher and a local who lived alone. No one came for her on Sunday.
In the house next to the cemetery, 66-year-old Valya Voronets cooked home-grown potatoes in a wood-heated room without water, electricity or gas. A small radio was on but not for long as the news got too depressing. There was a plate of freshly cut radishes by the window.
At one point, a Russian soldier came running and pointed his gun at her husband after seeing him climb onto the roof to get a cell phone signal. “Are you going to kill an old man?” Myhailo Scherbakov, 65, answered.
Not all Russians were like that. Voronets said she cried along with another soldier, barely 21 years old. “You’re too young,” she told him. Another soldier told her they didn’t want to fight.
Still, she feared them all. But she offered them milk from her only cow.
“I felt sorry for them in those conditions,” she said. “And if you’re nice to them, they might not kill you.”
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