by Lorenzo Cremonesi
Fifty kilometers from Kyiv, another destroyed village: more than 200 dead still under the rubble, in the gardens or in the cellars. Similar massacres occurred in the cities around Kharkiv and Chernihiv
from our correspondent
BUCHA There are no limits to the worst. Now it turns out that Borodyanka’s horrors can be even more serious than Bucha’s. There is still a lot to discover in the areas just abandoned by the Russian army. Just before Bucha, signs of destruction and death can be seen in the countryside that we had not noticed two days ago, in the eagerness to arrive as quickly as possible at the place that was described to us as the place of the heaviest massacres were civilians. There are groups of villas and some sheds that were hit by bombs and completely burned down. And in the surrounding woods you can see labyrinths of ditches, bunkers dug in the dark earth and felled trees with deep traces of tracks lost in the vegetation. “The Russian tankers took shelter of the pine trees to escape our drones. It is not excluded that they also take their prisoners there. Many were then attacked from the air. The area still needs to be searched, admits a Ukrainian official.
Signs of torture of civilians are emerging in villages around Kyiv, and Zelenskyi government officials claim that horrific atrocities have been recorded in the town of Borodyanka, some twenty kilometers northeast of Bucha and some fifty kilometers from the capital. “Most of the buildings have been destroyed, we estimate that 200 people are still dead under the rubble, in the basements and in the gardens. Our area was the first to be occupied by Russian troops when they invaded Kyiv on February 24 and was only liberated last Sunday. It still has to be cleaned up and made arable. As in Bucha, we are looking for mass graves, says Borodyanka Mayor Georgiy Erko. President Zelensky himself spoke of this yesterday in his appeal speech to the United Nations.
The ordeal
The area had been hit by the violence of war right from the start of the attack on the capital. The Russian columns had passed here on their way from Chernobyl to join the airborne troops barricaded at Hostomel Airport. But the whole operation had failed, causing many casualties among the Russians. It cannot be ruled out that several Ukrainian civilians were also killed or injured at this time. That’s when the Borodyanka ordeal began: the entire center is being gutted and the number of buildings hit or burned down is more than 80% of the city’s area. Some reporters saw clothing and blankets thrown onto the plants by the force of the blasts. News of massacres are also coming from the towns around Kharkiv, from which the Russians are retreating more and more quickly, and also from Chernihiv, on the KyivRussia road, and then from Sumy and Izyum, where Putin’s commandos want to reorganize the troops to Siege of Ukrainian contingents committed to stemming enemy advance from Donbass. And we still have to wait to understand what really happened in the Mariupol slaughterhouse.
Yesterday we were able to move freely on the wardirty streets of Bucha for at least three hours. The bodies identified over the past few days had all been collected and police documented and photographed the bloodstains on the ground and all the remains, which are aiding the investigation into Ukraine’s decision to charge the Russians with “war crimes” before the international court could from The Hague. Near a mall, Gennady Chernasky, a 47yearold businessman, shows where he and his 13 family members managed to survive. “In the garden we had collected a lot of wood and buckets of water for cooking. We didn’t light candles at night, we were afraid that the Russians might break in,” he explains. His words are factual. «Here the Russians and Ukrainians fired with the same intensity. The Russian commanders were near the power plant and in the tallest buildings, the Ukrainians carried out carpet bombing, even many of our cars were destroyed by their shots, he says.
The shots at families
But he also doesn’t hesitate to point out that the Russians have been shooting at families trying to flee in their cars, showing his neighbor’s SUV crushed in a sieve of bullet holes. Regarding the robberies by the Russians, he says that the abandoned apartments were systematically searched. “They took everything with them. In the circle of our buildings we stayed in 4 families out of 124, the Russians had made a huge booty», he recalls. The shops and department stores seem to have done the same, but not the supermarkets and grocery stores, where the starving Ukrainian population literally competed with the Russians for whatever edible food was left.
The 42yearold Valery, on the other hand, has a special testimony: “We were locked in our small apartment with my 75yearold mother Sofia when ten Russian soldiers broke in on the morning of March 12. They wanted my laptop, I replied that I don’t have one. They left, but at the end of March they came back, they locked my mother in the bathroom and accused me of being a spy, they shot in the air, they wanted to kill me in the garage. I knelt before them and prayed to their God in Russian, as I belong to the Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Then they threatened to come back the next day. But they left the same evening.’
April 5, 2022 (Modified April 5, 2022 | 10:42 p.m.)
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