It is impossible to comprehend how Iryna Kostenko could have hauled her murdered son’s body into a wheelbarrow, pushed him home and then buried him in the shallow grave she dug in the frozen soil.
“I covered the grave in a blanket to protect it from the dogs,” she said. “He isn’t in a coffin – I had to roll him in a carpet.”
And then, weeping uncontrollably, she held up a photograph of Olekseii, killed at 27, and wailed “This is my love, my sweetheart.”
I cried too as I watched Iryna, 45, speaking to the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen this week. Olekseii’s pitiful grave, his mother’s utter desolation – yet another human tragedy in a huge, incomprehensible horror. But Iryna’s face and the sound of her sobs keep coming back to me.
We have all wept at the nightmarish images emerging from Ukraine.
The mass graves, the body bags, the charred remains. The torso of a woman with a Nazi swastika burned into her flesh who’d been raped and tortured to death.
The sickening reports from Bucha, Andriivka and Kalynivka are almost too painful to bear. It feels wrong to be staring at dead bodies. Some friends have told me they simply cannot watch any more and that they find the newspaper and TV coverage voyeuristic and intrusive.
But we are not looking at corpses. We are looking at people.
At innocent men, women and children murdered by barbaric Russian soldiers and denied the dignity of a proper grave.
They could be us. We could be them. I could be Iryna. So we must not look away.
We should thank God for the courage and professionalism of Jeremy Bowen and all the other journalists risking their lives to report the genocide being perpetrated by Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin.
Because while world leaders step up sanctions against Russia and try to strengthen Ukraine’s defence, THEY are bearing witness to war crimes.
And the evidence they are gathering will help to convict the Butchers of Bucha and beyond when they’re finally dragged before international courts.
Then Ukraine will prove to be the graveyard for Putin and for Putinism.
And Olekseii and the other innocent souls might finally rest in peace.
