Bucha’s month of terror | World News,The Indian Express

A mother killed a sniper while walking with her family to fetch a thermos of tea. A woman held as a sex slave, naked except for a fur coat and locked in a potato cellar before being executed. Two sers dead in their home, their bodies left slumped on the floor for weeks.
Bucha is a landscape of horrors.
From the first day of the war, Feb. 24, civilians bore the brunt of the Russian assault on Bucha, a few miles west of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. Russian special forces approaching on foot through the woods shot at cars on the road, and a column of armored vehicles fired on and killed a woman in her garden as they drove into the suburb.
🗞️ Subscribe Now: Get Express Premium to access the best Election reporting and analysis 🗞️
But those early cruelties paled in comparison to what came after.
As the Russian advance on Kyiv stalled in the face of fierce resance, civilians said, the enemy occupation of Bucha slid into a campaign of terror and revenge. When a defeated and demoralised Russian army finally retreated, it left behind a grim tableau: bodies of dead civilians strewn on streets, in basements or in backyards, many with gunshot wounds to their heads, some with their hands tied behind their backs.
Reporters and photographers for The New York Times spent more than a week with city officials, coroners and scores of witnesses in Bucha, uncovering new details of execution-style atrocities against civilians. The Times documented the bodies of almost three dozen people where they were killed — in their homes, in the woods, set on fire in a vacant parking lot — and learned the story behind many of their deaths. The Times also witnessed more than 100 body bags at a communal grave and the city’s cemetery.
The evidence suggests the Russians killed recklessly and sometimes sadically, in part out of revenge.
Halina Feoktova mourns the death of her son Volodymyr Feoktov, 50, who was shot dead on March 4 Russian soldiers, at a communal grave the Church of St. Andrews in Bucha. (Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times)
Unsuspecting civilians were killed carrying out the simplest of daily activities. A retired teacher known as Auntie Lyuda, short for Lyudmyla, was shot midmorning on March 5 as she opened her front door on a small side street. Her body lay twed, half inside the door, more than a month later.
Her younger ser Nina, who was mentally disabled and lived with her, was dead on the kitchen floor. It was not clear how she died.
“They took the territory and were shooting so no one would approach,” a neighbor, Serhiy, said. “Why would you kill a grandma?”
Roman Havryliuk, 43, a welder, and his brother Serhiy Dukhli, 46, sent the rest of their family out of Bucha as the violence intensified, but both insed on staying behind. They were found dead in their yard. “My uncle stayed for the dog, and my father stayed for the house,” Havryliuk’s son, Nazar, said. An unknown man also lay dead near, and the family’s two dogs were riddled with bullets.

“They were not able to defeat our army so they killed ordinary people,” said Nazar, 17.
Bucha had been one of the most desirable commuter suburbs of Kyiv. Nestled between fir tree forests and a river, it had modern shopping malls and new residential complexes as well as old-fashioned summer cabins set among gardens and trees. Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov had a summer house there.
Days after Russian troops drove into town, the Ukrainian army struck back, setting tanks and armored vehicles ablaze in an attack on a Russian column. As many as 20 vehicles burned in a huge fireball that ignited homes all along one side of the street. Some Russian soldiers fled, carrying their wounded through the woods.
Russian reinforcements arrived several days later in an aggressive mood. They set up base in an apartment complex behind School No. 3, the main high school on Vokzalna, or Station Street, and posted a sniper in a high-rise building still under construction. They made their headquarters farther south in a glass factory on the Bucha River.
Until then, the residents of Bucha had been sheltering from Russian missile and artillery strikes, many of them sleeping in basements and cellars, but some had ventured outside from time to time to get water or sneak a look at the damage. Shelling had been sporadic, and much of the Russian artillery fire was aimed over their heads at Irpin, the next town over.

On March 5, a Russian sniper began firing on anything moving south of the high school.
Auntie Lyuda was shot in the morning. That afternoon, a father and his son stepped out of their gate to go for a walk along their street, Yablunska, or Apple Tree Street. “They shot my son,” his father, Ivan, said. “I was next to him. It would be better if it had been me.”
He asked that only his first name be published. Many residents in Bucha were frightened after weeks under Russian occupation and asked that their surnames not be published for fear of retribution at a later stage.
Yablunska Street, where they lived, soon became the deadliest stretch of road for passing civilians. A man on his bicycle was struck fire from an armored vehicle in early March, as video recorded the Ukrainian military showed. March 11 there were at least 11 dead bodies lying on the street and sidewalks, satellite footage showed.
It soon became apparent why the bodies had remained in place so long.
Troops started searching homes and ordered residents not to go outside. “They were going yard yard,” said Valerii Yurchenko, 42, a mechanic living near the river. A Russian commander warned him not to go out on the street. “We have orders to shoot,” the commander said.
Ukraine’s official ombudswoman for human rights, Lyudmyla Denisova, said she had recorded horrific cases of sexual violence Russian troops in Bucha and other places, including one in which a group of women and girls were kept in a basement of a house for 25 days. Nine of them are now pregnant, she said.
She speculated that the violence came out of revenge for the Ukrainian resance, but also that the Russian soldiers used sexual violence as a weapon of war against Ukrainian women.

In the last week of March, Ukrainian forces mounted a counterattack to retake the northwestern suburbs of Kyiv. Fighting intensified sharply in Bucha, and Russian units began preparing to pull out.
One of their last acts was to shoot their detainees or anyone else who got in the way. In a clearing on one street, the police later found five members of a family, including two women and a child, their bodies dumped and burned.
In accounts corroborated a local military commander, residents described how a Ukrainian ambush that blew up the armored vehicle and supply truck led to a flurry of Russian violence targeting civilians.
In the days after Ukrainian troops retook control of Bucha, police and cemetery workers began collecting the corpses scattered everywhere, heaving black body bags into a white van. In the mud on the back doors, workers had written, “200,” the word in Soviet military slang for the war dead.
April 2, they had collected more than 100 bodies, and Sunday the number had risen to more than 360 for the Bucha drict. Ten of the dead were children, officials said.
The street corner where Tetiana Sichkar was killed on March 24 in Bucha. Russian soldiers kept guard behind the wall. (Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times)
Of the 360, more than 250 were killed bullets or shrapnel and were being included in an investigation of war crimes, Ruslan Kravchenko, chief regional prosecutor in Bucha, said in an interview. Many others died from hunger, the cold and the lack of medicine and doctors, among other reasons.
The Russian brutality has outraged most of the world and stiffened the resolve of the West to oppose President Vladimir Putin’s bloody invasion.
“The level of brutality of the army of terrors and executioners of the Russian Federation knows no bounds,” the ombudswoman, Denisova, wrote. She appealed to the United Nations Human Rights Commission to “take into account these facts of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.”
Some of the worst crimes — including torture, rape and executions of detainees — were committed troops based at the glass factory in Bucha, local residents and investigators said. The regional prosecutor, Kravchenko, said investigators found a computer server left behind the Russians that could help them identify the men behind the violence.

“We have already established ls and data of servicemen,” Kravchenko said. “This data runs to more than a hundred pages.”
Ukrainian investigators also have an immense resource from organisations, citizens and journals who have posted more than 7,000 videos and photos on a government internet hub, warcrimes.gov.ua, the state prosecutor, Iryna Venediktova, said.
“What is very important here is that they are made in such a way that they are admissible evidence in court,” she said. “That is 7,000 with video evidence, with photo evidence.” Yet a long and laborious process of identification lies ahead.