(Berlin) The German intelligence services (BND) have recorded radio communications from Russian soldiers in which they discuss the abuses committed in Boutcha, northwest of Kyiv, where dozens of corpses were discovered, sparking outrage, says the magazine on Thursday der Spiegel.
Posted at 2:16 p.m.
The content of certain exchanges corresponds to photos of corpses found in Boutcha and which have sparked a wave of international condemnation, several leaders including the German Olaf Scholz evoking “war crimes” perpetrated by the Russians in this locality taken over by Ukrainian forces , according to the same source.
BND officials informed deputies of these intercepted conversations, continues der Spiegelfor whom these recordings contradict the version delivered by Moscow according to which the corpses of people in civilian clothes found in Boutcha were placed there after the Russian troops evacuated the place.
Thus, in one of the radio messages mentioned by der Spiegel, a soldier explains to another that he and his colleagues shot a person on a bicycle. However, the photo of a corpse lying on its bicycle went around the world and AFP journalists saw this corpse as well as those of about twenty men dressed in civilian clothes while traversing one of the longest Boutcha’s arteries.
In another radio message, a man says: “We first interrogate the soldiers, then we kill them”.
These messages also confirm that Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group in Ukraine would have participated in these abuses, the magazine continues.
“The soldiers spoke of the atrocities as of their daily life,” he wrote, assuring that these executions were not committed accidentally by Russian soldiers acting without orders.
These discoveries are not limited to Boutcha. In Motijine, 50 kilometers west of Kyiv, AFP saw four half-buried bodies in a pit dug in the forest. Among them, the mayor of this village, her husband and her son who had disappeared.
The German government had estimated Wednesday that the Russian position according to which the death of the civilians was a scene was “not tenable” in view of the satellite images which were broadcast.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the killings “the worst war crimes” since World War II and “genocide”.
Westerners have for their part announced a strengthening of sanctions against Moscow.