Report
“I turned my head, I saw all these corpses on the ground”: Boutcha, an open-air cemetery
Audio 01:30
Several bodies, in civilian clothes, in a street in Boutcha, near kyiv, on April 2.
AFP - RONALDO SCHEMIDT
Text by: Vincent Souriau |
Sami Boukhelifa Follow
5 mins
Dozens of civilian bodies have been discovered in Boutcha, a town on the outskirts of kyiv occupied by Russian forces for a month.
Just released, the Ukrainian troops saw the horror there.
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From our special correspondents in Boutcha,
Commander Stanislav Poloukhin orders his driver to stop.
On the ground, the bodies of two civilians.
One of them is decapitated.
The almost mummified skull is placed at the feet of the corpse.
A toothless jaw.
A few tufts of gray hair.
More face.
The dread.
When ?
How? 'Or' What ?
Why could such a thing happen?
The commander does not explain it.
"
I don't know what happened here
," he said.
I only note that these two corpses have been there for a while.
At least two or three weeks I would say… Maybe more.
Look what condition they are in.
I don't know how they died.
A mine maybe… In fact, I don't know at all.
»
Monday, April 4, our special envoys saw
half a dozen corpses in the streets of Boutcha
.
Sometimes charred bodies, with missing limbs.
Others abandoned on the side of the road.
Like that of a man in his sixties, dead in the middle of the street with his groceries spread out around him.
Two other remains discovered near a shell crater, the head torn off.
It is impossible to establish the circumstances of their death, but each time they were civilian victims.
None wore a uniform, but everyday clothes: sports shoes, trousers, a jacket or a winter coat.
Revolted, the commander takes to the road again.
A desolate landscape.
A city crushed by fighting.
Anger, bitterness, a mixture of feelings is expressed.
Hate.
Stanislav, Slava as his men call him, speaks with an open heart: “
I hate them, I hate Putin and his army
.
And all those people who wanted this war against Ukraine.
I want this war to end.
Do I want revenge?
Obviously.
But I do not wish the Russian people the same atrocities.
The Russians are innocent.
In a way, they are prisoners in their own country
.
»
“They shot him like that, for no reason”
Commander Stanislav and his men meet civilians, mostly elderly people.
Survivors of horror, traumatized.
Mykola Zakharchenko is one of them.
He testifies: here, the Russians executed people in cold blood.
“
I saw a woman next to us, a little further up the street, she was trying to hide, she wanted to enter a house… And bang.
»
Another day, the Russians arrived and “
they blew up all the cars and a tractor with a bazooka
,” he says.
There was someone cooking his meal on a fire outside, he threw a log into the fire and they shot him like that, for no reason.
He must have been 70 years old.
»
► To read also: Propaganda, internal violence in the Russian army: how to explain the abuses in Boutcha?
One of his neighbours, coming out of his underground shelter, was targeted by the Russians.
They shot him in the leg.
Then, "
they left him on the ground
", continues Mykola Zakharchenko.
“
I have seen all of this with my own eyes.
I saw a man come into his garage, they fired a bazooka at it.
I was there when we picked up his remains.
We filled four plastic bags and buried them.
Unable to go to the cemetery, he had to dig the grave in the garden.
He also says he had to use a backhoe to move the bodies of several people to bury them in a hole dug behind the railway line.
Bodies belonging to inhabitants who died of natural causes, and those “
shot down by the Russians.
»
300 bodies scattered in the city
Natalia Stepanenko, a resident of Boutcha, also reports horror scenes.
She barricaded herself in her house with her family and didn't go out for a month.
From her small window, she saw the Russian tanks arriving.
"
We were stuck like hostages,
" she says.
I tried to go see my neighbour, but his house had just burned down… He took me in his arms, he told me that he had nothing left… And when I turned my head, I saw all these corpses on the ground...
"
Around her, impacts pierce the ground.
"
It's the bombings,
" she continues.
It was falling all the time and we went to hide in the basement.
That's how we survived with all those bombs and all those shots… And next to us, in the house next door, there were those Chechen soldiers who partied every night.
»
No final report has yet been given on the number of dead found in Boutcha, but the morgue is overwhelmed.
Sergei is a voluntary gravedigger.
He says he found around 300 bodies in the city, only three of which were wearing a soldier's uniform.
“Bodies are found everywhere [...] The bodies bore the marks of torture.
»
Testimony of Sergeï, voluntary gravedigger
Vincent Souriau Sami Boukhelifa
To bury them,
mass graves
had to be dug behind the town church.
These are three trenches where the body bags are buried.
A transitional solution, explains the priest of the church.
All deceased persons will be exhumed in order to be offered a religious ceremony and a decent burial.
© RFI
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