“Right before my eyes, a man was shot who was going to get food from the supermarket.”
(Read here: Civilians from Bucha were deliberately targeted, according to the UN)
In Bucha, Olena explains to AFP how Russian forces, other than regular troops, spread terror in the town. Located 30 km northwest of the center of kyiv, the town was occupied by the invading army from February 27 and was inaccessible for more than a month.
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The shelling stopped on March 31 and Ukrainian forces were unable to gain full access until a few days ago. During the entire month of occupation by the Russian forces, Olena, who does not want to give her last name, took refuge with her 7 and 9-year-old children in the basement without electricity of a four-story social housing building, in the company of other inhabitants who stayed there.
“There was no Ukrainian army in the town, only the territorial defense, composed mainly of guards from local companies, without weapons. And then they fled” when the Russians arrived, this 43-year-old woman, talkative and with a powerful voice, explains to AFP.
I myself saw how they fired on people. Right before my eyes, a man who was going to get food from the supermarket was shot
“In the beginning, there were mostly young (Russian) soldiers. Then, two weeks later, there were others. Older ones, they were over 40 years old. They were cruel. They mistreated everyone. And that’s when the massacres started.” she adds before interrupting her speech, pensive and with a somber face.
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‘corpses on blood’
According to Olena, the more seasoned men “were very well equipped, they wore black and dark green uniforms,” different from those of the regular army.
“There were nice guys among the Russian soldiers and there were very tough men, especially officers from the FSB,” the Russian security services, says Olena, wearing a red beanie, fleece jacket, and sports pants and shoes.
“I approached the soldiers to ask them what I should feed my children. And they gave us rations and food. They were the ones who told us that it was the FSB who forbade us to move, that they were very violent special forces. It was Russians who said this of the Russians.” “I myself saw how people were being shot. Right before my eyes, a man who was going to get food from the supermarket was shot,” she says.
There were good guys among the Russian soldiers and there were very tough men, especially FSB officers.
Only women could go to get water or food. The men were forbidden to go outside and had to stay at home. “Our neighbors went out to go throw the garbage. It was around 5 pm, there were two men and a woman.
One of the men had served in the army. They didn’t come back. They were found by some women from our building when they were looking for firewood in the patio of a house. The corpses were lying in blood on the ground, with bullet marks,” he explains.
(In other news: Mass graves in Ukraine could be evidence of Russian war crimes)
“When the FSB agents arrived, they asked us: ‘Why didn’t you leave?’ I told them that I have lived here for 43 years, with a quiet life. Go where? Then, they began to treat us as traitors because we had not left.”
On Saturday, AFP saw the bodies of at least 22 people in civilian clothes on the streets of Bucha. One of them was lying near a bicycle and another had bags of supplies next to it. A corpse had its hands tied behind its back.
‘Common pits’
On Monday, the bodies of five men, also with their hands tied, were found in the basement of a children’s clinic, the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office announced.
According to the mayor of Bucha, Anatoly Fedoruk, 280 people were buried in “mass graves” in recent days given the high number of deaths.
In the center of the municipality, on Monday, a street full of about twenty smashed bodies of Russian troop transport vehicles, tank trucks and light armored vehicles, some already rusty, could still be seen in the middle of destroyed houses.
The column was probably targeted by Ukrainian shelling shortly after the Russians arrived in the town in late February.
In the gardens, there were still some areas with the earth and the grass removed, with shell casings scattered around, more or less aligned one against the other, suggesting that artillery had been installed to attack the kyiv region.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said on Monday that there were signs of “video falsification” and “disinformation” in the images presented by the Ukrainian authorities. “Judging from what we’ve seen, we can’t trust these video images,” he said.
AFP
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