From CARA ANNA
April 9, 2022 GMT
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-war-crimes-7791e247ce7087dddf64a2bbdcc5b888
BUCHA, Ukraine (AP) – There is a body in the basement of an abandoned yellow house at the end of the street near the railway. The man is young, pale, with a dried stream of blood to his mouth, shot to death and left in the dark, and no one knows why the Russians brought him there, to a home that is not his.
There is a pile of toys near the basement stairs. Plastic clothespins swing in an empty line under a cold, gray sky. They are all that is left of the norm in this blackened part of the street in Bucha, where the steps of tanks lie pulled out of charred vehicles, civilian cars are crushed and boxes of ammunition are lined up next to empty Russian military rations and bottles of alcohol.
The man in the basement is almost late, another body in a city where death is abundant, but there are no satisfactory explanations for it.
A resident, Nikola Babak, points to the man after pondering the stage in a small yard nearby. There lay three men. One lacks an eye. Someone has placed a handful of yellow flowers on an old carpet near one of the bodies.
A dog walks around a stroller around the corner, excited. The cart holds the body of another dog. He was also shot.
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This story is part of an ongoing investigation by the Associated Press and Frontline, which includes the interactive experience of War Crimes Watch Ukraine and an upcoming documentary.
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A marmot stands with a cigarette in one hand, a plastic bag of cat food in the other.
“I’m very calm today,” he said. “I shaved for the first time.”
At the beginning of their month-long occupation of Bucha, he said, the Russians were holding on almost to themselves, focused on progress. When that stopped, they went from house to house looking for young men, sometimes taking documents and telephones. The Ukrainian resistance seems to be wearing them. The Russians seemed more angry, more impulsive. Sometimes they looked drunk.
The first time they visited Babak, they were polite. But when they returned to his birthday, March 28, they shouted at him and his son-in-law. They put the grenade in the son-in-law’s armpit and threatened to pull the pin. They took an AK-47 and fired near Babak’s feet. Let’s kill him, one of them said, but another Russian told them to leave him and go.
Before leaving, the Russians asked him an excellent question: “Why are you still here?”
Like many who stayed in Bucha, Babak is older – 61. It was not so easy to leave. He thought he would be spared. Yet in the end, the stressed Russians accused him of being a saboteur. He spent a month under occupation with no connection to the world, no electricity, no running water, cooking on fire. He was not prepared for this war.
Maybe the Russians weren’t either.
At about 6 pm on March 31 – and Babak remembers this clearly – the Russians jumped into their vehicles and left so quickly that they abandoned the bodies of their companions.
Now he is watching the police and other investigators arrive, examine the bodies in the yard and leave. He wonders when the bodies will be taken away so that families can grieve. Down the road there is an empty playground, steps from six charred bodies. People don’t know who they are.
“We were fine on this street,” Babak said, taking stock of the occupation. In Bucha, everything is relative. “They did not shoot at anyone who came out of their house. They did it on the next street. “
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While walking around Bucha, a reporter came across two dozen witnesses to the Russian occupation. Almost everyone said they saw a body, sometimes a few more. Civilians were killed, mostly men, sometimes randomly abducted. Many, including the elderly, say they themselves have been threatened.
The question that survivors, investigators and the world would like to answer is why. Ukraine has seen the horrors of Mariupol, Kharkiv, Chernihiv and nearby Irpin. But photos of this city an hour’s drive from Kyiv – burnt bodies, bodies tied up, bodies scattered near bicycles and flattened cars – stuck in the global consciousness like no other.
“It simply came to our notice then. But it’s hard to know what the motivation is behind it, “a senior US defense official said this week, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the military assessment.
Bucha residents are proposing theories as they leave cold homes and basements. Some believe that the Russians were not ready for a long battle or had particularly undisciplined fighters among them. Some believe the house-to-house attack on younger men was a hunt for those who have fought the Russians in recent years in separatist-held eastern Ukraine and taken refuge in the city.
Sometimes, they say, the Russians themselves explained why they killed.
In one backyard in Bucha, there are three graves dug by neighbors, too scared to put them elsewhere. One of the dead was killed on March 4, hit in the head with the butt of a rifle.
On March 15, Russians asked a friend of the dead man for his documents. They are at home, he said. On the way there they passed the grave. He pointed it out. The next moment, witness Irina Kolisnik said, the soldiers shot him.
“He talked too much,” one said, adding swear words.
Eventually, every bit of discipline fell apart. “They went from normal soldiers to much, much worse ones,” said Roman Skitenko, 24, who saw four civilian bodies on the street near his house.
Grenades were thrown into basements, bodies were thrown into wells. An elderly man in a nursing home was found dead in his bed, apparently out of negligence, while a younger man, perhaps a caregiver, was lying outside, shot. Women in their 70s were told not to stick their heads out of their houses, otherwise they would be killed. “If you leave your home, I will obey the order and you know what the order is. I will burn down your house, “recalls Tatiana Petrovskaya, who was told by a soldier.
Now that the Russians have left, the bodies are being collected by searchers wary of traps and mines. The corpse bags are lined up in the cemetery. Some bags are not completely closed. One look shows the bloodied face of a young man. Another shows a pair of white sneakers. Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk said the number of civilians killed was 320 on Wednesday. Most died from gunshots, and some corpses were “thrown away like firewood” in mass graves.
Vladislav Minchenko is an artist who helps collect bodies. During the occupation, he found another way to help – spot the Russians with binoculars and tell the “right people” where they were. He says he was discovered three weeks ago.
The Russians came, undressed him and put him against the wall to shoot him. But at that last moment, something changed. The Russians had a list of Ukrainian soldiers they had to look for, and it so happened that Minchenko stayed with one.
“I was almost killed,” he says, “but someone said, ‘This is not the man on the list.'”
He worries that the Russians will return with more experienced fighters who may not hesitate to shoot.
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Many Bucha residents describe such frightening encounters. One building was used as a base by the Russians; residents were forced to stay in the garbage-filled basement. It was cold and crowded, about 100 people. They used toilet bowls. There was not enough food. The babies were crying.
On March 3 or 4, a resident going to the shelter was told to stand near the bodies of several murdered men, some with their hands tied.
“I thought they were going to shoot us right there,” she said, without saying her name. As she stood and cried, a Russian soldier told her not to be afraid, they only wanted to talk to men. She was released three days later. It is not clear why.
80-year-old Galina Cheredinachenko is a few houses away. She is leaning on two canes near the end of the sidewalk, and there is a bright pink scarf around her head. When the Russians came to her door in the early days of the occupation, they parked their tank in her front yard, nearly crushing her bulbs.
She refused to go to the shelter. Instead, the Russians moved in with her. They cooked in her yard, slept in her house, used her teapot. She gave them her tomatoes and cucumbers. She was told not to leave her room. “They weren’t bad, they just didn’t let me out,” she said.
She is just beginning to learn about the real victims of the city – how at least four people were killed in her area, all civilians, and how the Russians told people to bury the dead in their backyards.
“I was born during World War II,” says Cheredinachenko. “If you tell me that the Nazis did this, I will understand. I don’t understand how the Russians can do that.
They were hungry, says another survivor, 63-year-old Natalia Alexandrova. They felt cold.
At first, she says, the Russians behaved: “They said they had come in three days.” But the war continued and they began to plunder. Clothes, shoes, alcohol, gold, money. They filmed TV screens for no reason.
They feared that there were spies among the Ukrainians. Alexandrova says her nephew was detained on March 7th after being spotted filming destroyed tanks with her phone. He was accused of being a Ukrainian nationalist. Four days later, he was found in a basement shot in the ear.
Days later, thinking the Russians were missing, Alexandrova and a neighbor escaped to close nearby homes and protect them from looting. The Russians caught them and took them to a basement.
They asked us, “Which type of death do you prefer, slow or fast?” A grenade or a pistol?
“I told them I didn’t want to die,” she said. They were given 30 seconds to decide.
Suddenly the soldiers were called, leaving Alexandrova and her neighbor shaken but alive.
“I’m not saying everyone was crazy, but some were very …
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