Russian atrocities uncovered in newly liberated areas

Cartoon depicting Russian soldier with boots of dead Ukrainian child, on phone with his wife. (r/Ukraine)

In what is being called “The Bucha Massacre”, Ukrainian military and civilian personnel were met with a gruesome scene. Dead bodies lay in the street, at least a couple of them bound. These were unprovoked attacks on civilians. Some of the video shown on the Ukraine subreddit includes dead people next to their bicycle. It appears that the Russians just shot into the civilians. There are other accounts, on the subreddit, of how the Russians set up torture rooms in civilian homes they took over.

From the Associated Press:

BUCHA, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine’s troops found brutalized bodies with bound hands, gunshot wounds to the head and signs of torture after Russian soldiers withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv, authorities said Sunday, sparking new calls for a war crimes investigation and sanctions against Russia.

Associated Press journalists in Bucha, a small city northwest of the capital, saw the bodies of at least nine people in civilian clothes who appeared to have been killed at close range. At least two had their hands tied behind their backs. The AP also saw two bodies wrapped in plastic, bound with tape and thrown into a ditch.

Authorities said they were documenting evidence of alleged atrocities to add to their case for prosecuting Russian officials for war crimes. To convict, International Criminal Court prosecutors will need to show a pattern of indiscriminant deadly assaults on civilians during Russia’s invasion.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said scores of residents were found slain on the streets of Bucha and the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin and Hostomel in what looked like a “scene from a horror movie.”

Some people were shot in the head and had their hands bound, and some bodies showed signs of torture, Arestovych said. There also were reports of rapes, he said.

A day earlier, AP journalists witnessed Ukrainian soldiers gingerly removing at least six bodies from a street in Bucha with cables in case the Russians had booby-trapped corpses with explosives before their withdrawal. Local residents said the dead people were civilians killed without provocation, a claim that could not be independently verified.

The Associated Press has the story here.

Category: Russia