(Kiev) Eighty years after the site of Babi Yar served as a mass grave for 30,000 Jews murdered by Nazi occupiers in Ukraine, five bodies lie on the ground, covered in a thin layer of snow, after a strike Russian.
Posted at 8:50 a.m.
The strike of a Russian missile against the television tower in Kiev occurred on Tuesday afternoon. Since then, no one has dared approach the bodies.
“We were told to stay away, the Russian saboteurs could be present to finish the job,” Volodymyr Roudenko, a 50-year-old lawyer and defense volunteer who spent the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, told AFP. , pending forensics.
According to the police, it is a priori a family that has been decimated: father, mother, daughter and adolescent son. But the victims could not yet be identified. They were killed leaving the grocery store where they were stocking up just before curfew.
The alarm of the store, with the windows and shelves pulverized by the strike, rings it in the void.
The fifth victim is a journalist from state television, according to a press card found on him and presented to AFP.
A military van stamped “morgue” arrived in the morning, and the soldiers in charge of evacuating the charred bodies struggle awkwardly in the cold and stupor, to unfold the gray plastic sheet that will be used to cover them.
The television tower, a 300 m high metal structure that disappears in the fog, is blackened by the blast of the explosion, but still stands. Another state television branch took over broadcasting.
At the foot of the great red and white iron lady, a field of debris pulverized on the road is visible for several tens of meters.
“This tower is our symbol of truth, of free information, of real news, it is our truth that they want to attack,” asserts Mr. Roudenko, the armed volunteer-lawyer.
Nazi massacre
But the site is also that of another symbol.
All around, and under their feet, stretches for several kilometers the highly symbolic site of Babi Yar, a mass grave containing the remains of 33,000 Jews who were shot and killed there in 1941, while the city was under occupation. Nazi.
The memorial in their memory, a landscaped park located one kilometer from the television tower, was not directly affected by the strikes.
In the middle of the birches, in a silence muffled by the snow, suddenly interrupted by the disturbing howl of an air raid siren, the sculptures in memory of the victims, including an immense Menorah, a Jewish candelabra, are quite intact, noted a journalist from the AFP.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is himself Jewish, nevertheless accused Moscow on Wednesday of seeking to “erase” Ukraine and its history, calling on Jews “not to remain silent”.
For the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine, Moshe Asman, who is organizing the evacuation of the local Jewish community from the city of Kiev, the Russian strike against civilians on this site is a “war crime”.
“I can’t believe what I see,” reacted Tuesday evening to AFP the Chief Rabbi, who during the last memorial ceremony organized a month ago in Babi Yar had warned: “a war is easy to start but very difficult to finish”.