On the day that the Russian forces stormed Bucha, Sergiy, a resident of the town, had a direct confrontation with one of the soldiers that almost cost him and his family their lives. He was at his house with his wife and his daughters when he heard noises in the street and went out to see what was happening. He then saw a group of Russian soldiers trying to loot the corner store, right next to his house. Although today he believes it was a mistake and he doesn’t know if he would do it again, at that moment he tried to stop them.
“They wanted to take something from the store, which is very close to my house. I saw that they had broken down the door and I asked them why they did that. At that moment, a Russian soldier approached me and, after searching me and finding nothing he could take, he shot at my house to demonstrate his power. Then they attacked all the houses that were around. That is why today they are all burned”, explains Sergiy.
The Russian army occupied this small town belonging to the Kyiv region for more than a month, from February 27 to March 31, 2022. Before that, they tried to invade Hostomel, another town also located to the west of the capital, which is considered strategic for its military and cargo airport. “Hostomel is strategically very important, but since they couldn’t occupy it, they invaded Bucha, Irpín and other towns,” says Ilona Melnykova, head of the department for international cooperation and European integration, who accompanies this journalist through Bucha.
On April 1, when the Russian troops withdrew, the Ukrainian military who entered the city found hundreds of corpses lying in the streets, some with their wrists tied behind their backs and clear signs of torture.
Official data from the Government of Ukraine put the number of fatalities in the city at 420 during that period of time. Subsequent investigations and autopsies revealed that many of these civilians were killed at point-blank range and that dozens of them were killed with tiny arrows used in artillery shrapnel.
Before cleaning up the city, the Ukrainian Armed Forces documented these mass murders, footage that traveled the world and sparked a strong international reaction.
Currently, it is difficult to find in Bucha visible signs of the violence that took place a few months ago. The Government of Ukraine has worked very quickly to rebuild all the areas affected by the shelling.
“Both for the citizens who left the city and for those who stayed, it is very dramatic and psychologically hard to see all those buildings destroyed. People want to go back to their home and a quiet life. For this reason, although the main thing now is the army, we are allocating a lot of resources to rebuild the cities”, says the president of the State Agency for Tourism Development of Ukraine, Mariana Oleskiv.
But some evidence of the passage of Russian troops through this town still remains, such as facades riddled with bullet holes, demolished electrical infrastructure, and burnt-out houses, vehicles, and supermarkets.
Sergiy guides us through the street where he still lives to show us some of the buildings that do seem to have been the target of war attacks. “The Russians fired at this building, which, luckily, was uninhabited at the time,” he explains, pointing to a ten-story decaying building. The cruelty of the Russians against that apartment block saved the structure behind it, which was inhabited and is still standing today.
In front of the building, lie several towers of an obsolete electrical infrastructure. “The Russians destroyed them and the Ukrainians moved them off the road so they could pass through,” says Sergiy.
Walking down the same block we came to an area of ??large houses. All of them are standing upright and appear to harbor life, except for one. “In this house an entire family was burned,” explains Sergiy. “All the time they were here, the Russians were shooting whole families every day for fun. They are animals. Well, not even animals do that, ”he adds.
In front of another of the houses, there is a car that has long been unusable. It has a hole through it from the trunk to the hood. “In their spare time, when they were bored, the Russians vandalized the neighbors’ cars. They did tests firing different weapons at the vehicles to see if they could cross it from end to end. That’s how they had fun, ”says Sergiy.
“They wouldn’t let us pick up the bodies from the streets to bury them, I don’t know why. The Russians shot anyone who came near a body to move it to the cemetery, which is far from the center of the city. So the priest asked them to let him collect some bodies and bury them in a big common grave. At first they refused, but ended up accepting. So Andriy, with some volunteers, brought the bodies here one by one”, Sergiy declares.
On April 15, two weeks after the Ukrainian army regained control of the city, the Ukrainian government mounted a major operation to exhume the bodies and subject them to autopsies to detect evidence of war crimes.
These autopsies, along with the testimonies of some residents who dared to speak up, revealed some of the torture that Russian soldiers carried out in Bucha during more than a month of occupation: mass rape of women and children, mutilation of different parts of the body and even extraction of teeth.
To this day, the Russian government continues to deny any involvement of its soldiers in the massacre. However, a voluntary Ukrainian intelligence initiative, InformNapalm, in collaboration with the Ukrainian security forces, claimed last May to have found the identity of the Russian battalion that orchestrated these crimes. This is the 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade, led by Lieutenant Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov, who was later nicknamed the “Bucha Butcher”.
On April 21, 2022, the British Government added Omurbekov to the list of persons subject to personal sanctions for war crimes in Ukraine and, specifically, for his involvement in acts of the Bucha massacre. A day later, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation promoted him to colonel and members of his brigade were given the status of “guards” by direct order of Vladimir Putin, according to the InformNapalm investigation.
On January 19, 2023, the European Parliament urged the European Union to create a special international court to prosecute Russian politicians and soldiers and their allies for crimes of aggression committed in Ukrainian cities such as Bucha and Irpin, among many others.
MEPs argue that the tribunal would serve to fill a legal vacuum in international criminal justice and complement the investigation of the International Criminal Court, which is currently unable to seek evidence of atrocities committed by Russia in Ukraine.
In the backyard of the church of San Andrés, Sergiy sadly contemplates the only memory that remains of that common grave, today covered by snow: a huge metal cross full of flowers and gifts that the neighbors have deposited here to remember their relatives murdered. There are no bodies here. After the Ukrainian authorities carried out the relevant autopsies, the neighbors were able to bury their relatives in traditional cemeteries, where they now rest in peace.
But fear and psychological damage persist in Bucha. Sergiy demands justice because, like the rest of his neighbors, he cannot forget what happened: “I always remember that period of the occupation. There were deaths, fear and a lot of terror. It is something that cannot be forgotten. We all live in fear that the Russians might come back.”