A month after the departure of Russian forces from Boutcha, a town northwest of kyiv, the house of the neighbor of Grygorii Kosian, a 54-year-old man with a gentle look, is frozen in time. As if its Russian occupants had left the day before, leaving the painful memory of their presence to drag on.
“I have permission to show people around”, slips Grygorii to the To have to. Empty liquor bottles are lying around everywhere. In the kitchen with shattered windows, mattresses pulled down from the second floor take up half the space, with piles of dirty dishes and trash on the counter and table. Upstairs, a bedroom window is smashed, suggesting a firing position, and several shell casings are scattered abandoned next to walnut scales. A trouser suit hangs on a hook in the bathroom, which is almost unsanitary, like the one on the ground floor.
The Russians established their quarters for a month in this house at the end of Ivana Franka Street, before leaving in disaster on March 31.
Across the street still lie the battered remains of a Russian BMD-4 armored vehicle. The charred wheels and tracks are pell-mell in a heap of metal, and the disjointed gun rests on the grass a few meters away. Located at the end of Boutcha, this usually quiet street is close to Irpin, a town the invaders attempted to capture in order to encircle kyiv, the capital, from the west.
Now is the time for repair, and the sound of saws and lawnmowers echoed on the sunny late April afternoon as the To have to.
Most of the city was cleared at lightning speed. But the horror experienced by the inhabitants of Boutcha is indelible. Two brothers who lived down the street are among those shot and killed. “Villagers, not soldiers,” says Grygorii, who saw their bodies lying there.
He himself was threatened with death a few times by the soldiers, who “had strange behavior” caused by alcohol and drugs, he believes. Residents of the area have paid the price for the Russian presence randomly. According to the Ukrainian authorities, more than 1,000 bodies of civilians have been discovered in Boutcha or its surroundings, victims of abuses.
Olena R. – who prefers to keep her last name silent -, 63, whose body was crossed by three bullets and who survived 15 days before being evacuated, is literally a miracle in the neighborhood. She considers herself lucky to be alive.
Met in her daughter’s house, where she has been residing a few streets away from her home since her release from the hospital, she shows the wounds caused by the two bullets that passed through the top of each of her thighs. A little shy, welcoming and upright, the woman tells her story without shame, remaining very factual. When she lifts her sweater, we see a bullet hole in her lower back. His belly is crossed by an impressive line of stitches of about fifteen centimeters.
The Russians had established a checkpoint at the end of Ivana Franka Street, next to the house they occupied. The soldiers had a clear view of the street in a straight line. Olena collapsed a few hundred meters away as she walked to a neighbor’s house to charge her cell phone. “I saw the soldiers at their post, behind me,” she says. I felt pressures in my body, I heard sounds. The pain was intense. “I lay there for quite a while. Then I started crawling,” she continues.
A young man who rented a room at her house put disinfectant and vodka on her wounds, and neighbors helped her in the following days. “I couldn’t evacuate because of the shelling and shooting,” she said. “The thought that I was going to die never crossed my mind,” she adds, nonetheless.
“She looked very ill when we arrived,” said Bohdan Maslov, 25, who evacuated her on 1er April in the evening with two friends. The Russians had just left the area. “She couldn’t walk more than three steps, otherwise she would lose consciousness,” he adds. With pain and misery, with long detours and fear in their stomachs, talking to her constantly so that she would not lose consciousness, they drove her to a bridge now destroyed which connects Irpin to kyiv, where doctors were waiting on the other side.
“Live as before”
This intense and terrifying period will not prevent Olena from returning to live at home as soon as possible, once the electricity returns. “I will take my mother, return to my house and live there as before,” she insists. She hesitates when asked if she will ever forgive the Russians. “I don’t think all Russian soldiers are inherently bad. Not everyone hurts, is it? she replies.
In Boutcha, hundreds of civilians were found in mass graves, and others were shot in the street. Moscow denied that any crimes were committed. Prosecutors from the Ukrainian General Prosecutor’s Office are working on their side to prove that there have been war crimes. French and British teams as well as members of the United Nations and other international organizations are also on site to document and collect evidence. A long, meticulous work, aiming to demonstrate the systematic nature of the atrocities committed.
At the city morgue, corpses of residents of Boutcha and surrounding villages continue to pour in, even though Russian forces left the area a month ago. Some residents who return home discover the bodies of loved ones, and others exhume them from where they were temporarily buried to determine the cause of their death and proceed with their identification.
When passing the To have to at the end of April, families waited patiently to be able to take their loved one to their final resting place. “I lead three ceremonies a day, but I still can’t get used to it because it’s too horrible,” says Volodymyr Vorona, a priest from a neighboring region. The local priests are overwhelmed and he has come to lend a hand. “We never felt like this, and I hope to never feel like this in the future,” he adds.
With the collaboration of Anton Shynkarenko